Tag Archives: Software

The Rise of the iPad

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About 6 months ago, my favorite laptop – a Surface Book that I bought in 2015 – finally got to the point where it was unusable. The screen had been heated up and forced out from the frame by an expanding battery to the point that it was just pointless to continue using it for as much as I had been. I bought a replacement battery and screen, but have not yet attempted the repair (it’s a very delicate and tedious process and I’m waiting to be in just the right mood before I get started on it).

I have other machines, so things like databases and email and games and whatnot were not a huge problem. The biggest issue was that I had been using the Surface Book for several years as my de facto sheet music repository. GBB music, gig music, wind symphony music, tuba and horn etudes….all of my sheet music was on the Surface Book and there was no way I was going back to using paper music. So I needed a solution.

At first, I tried using my phone. Bad plan. I’m almost 60 and my eyes have been shot for 25 years. In a pinch, I can read off the phone, but it’s strictly for emergencies at this point. After determining that the phone wasn’t going to work, I tried using a small (6”) Android tablet that Sandie had no further use for. It was a definite improvement, but the screen real estate was so limited that doing markup on the music was difficult and nearly impossible. Also, the software options for music display and markup available for Android is/was pretty limited. There’s basically one program for it, and it just doesn’t work that well. Apple, however, has an excellent piece of software for musicians called forScore, and so I finally took the plunge and bought myself an iPad – something that I’ve been swearing was a pointless thing to do since the iPad was first released.

To a large extent, I still believe that. I use my iPad almost exclusively as a sheet music organizer/editor/displayer; but I’ve started to play around with the little thing more and more trying to figure out just how much I can actually use it for. And, much to my surprise, I’m finding that I do indeed have uses for it.

For years, I kept the GBB library updated and organized using Microsoft Access. I like doing it that way because…well…because I was an Access Developer for many years and I’m comfortable building and customizing programs to do exactly what I want them to do in Access. The biggest problem with that is that if I don’t have the machine with the database on it, I can’t use the data in it. If I want to check to see if the band has a particular chart while I’m at rehearsal, for example, I can’t do it unless I’ve got a computer with Access installed. When I was using my Surface Book, that was not a problem.

With the iPad, however, using Access isn’t an option. And there really isn’t a decent alternative, short of putting everything online in MySQL or something and building a front end that I can use on the iPad. I actually tried this, but the MySQL clients that I could find for iPad absolutely suck and weren’t worth my time.

Next, I built a Power BI application on my work laptop and pointed it to a OneDrive copy of my GBB database, and it worked great! Power BI is available for iPad and I can fire it up and search the DB easily. Unfortunately, I can’t UPDATE data with Power BI, and I also can’t use it unless I’ve got a corporate license (that’s why I did this on my work machine), and nobody’s got the time or money for that.*

So I started looking into “database” applications built specifically for the iPad and found one that isn’t too terrible called MyStuff2. In spite of the ridiculous name, and in spite of the fact that there’s no way to do any real programming with it, MS2 has done a pretty good job for me in helping to organize and build out the GBB music library, and it allows me to have a to-the-minute reference of the library with me when I’m at rehearsal. I had to do quite a bit of initial setup to get things like I needed them and to export the information from my original Access DB into MS2, but having done that, things are looking good.

As I start building more advanced stuff in the woodshop, I’ve also been able to use the iPad to help with that.

Table saw workstation in construction
Adding a wing to my table saw workstation

One of those tools is called Moblo 3D, which is a kind of limited CAD and allows me to model what I want to build, calculate measurements, and build shopping and cut lists. For example, Sandie wants some very specific shelving units build for the master closet. So I used Moblo to start sketching those out. Works pretty good, although I really haven’t spent enough time with it to understand all that it can (or cannot) do for me. It wasn’t totally free, but I can’t complain about $8 for this thing.

Moblo 3D rendering of a couple of closet organizers. The nicest part of this for me is that I can design what I want and then export a list of the wood that I need and a cut list for it

Another tool that I’ve been using in the shop is the iPad version of X-Tool Creative Space, which connects to my laser engraver and lets me design stuff for it. The engraver is still very much of a toy, but I’ve been able to use it for branding wooden creations (rather than using my physical metal brand), and most recently did some engraving on a baton box for a gift that the band gave to our founder/music director on the occasion of his stepping down after 25 years.

The concert, by the way – the finale of our 25th season – went really well. Joe, the director, pulled out all the stops and included a couple of championship-level test pieces near the end. A severe chops buster, but the crowd seemed to enjoy it, and it was an exhausting but exhilarating set list.

Creation screen of X-Tools Creative Space

I guess the most recent tool I’ve added to the iPad is what I’m typing this on – the WordPress editor. I installed it a few days ago after realizing that – having purchased a mouse and keyboard for the iPad (specifically to use with the GBB library database) – I could probably do a lot more with the iPad than I had been previously. Restarting the blog entries seemed like a logical place to start, so that’s what I’m doing. Since the iPad is so portable, and since it’s so much easier to use as an editor than my phone is, I should be able to do updates from campsites (or anywhere else outside of my office) a lot easier than I’ve been able to previously. I’ll put that to the test in Canada (next month) and Michigan (in November).

For today, however, this has been enough.

*Actually, the GBB may be able to get a full-blown O365 license, including PBI, for a reasonable price by using our non-profit status. That is being investigated.

Week of 10/22/18

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Monday: Thought that I’d try something different this week and put down some notes from each day into a post that will be published at the end of the week.

I played a concert with the Gwinnett Wind Symphony yesterday afternoon. It wasn’t the best thing that I’ve ever been involved with, but it probably wasn’t the worst, either. We had a decent crowd at Gwinnett Infinity Theater, and – in spite of a few close calls – the band didn’t fall apart.

After the concert, I stopped at MicroCenter and picked up a mini Bluetooth keyboard, which I’ve paired to my phone (and am currently using to type this). Together with the WordPress app that I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, my phone is actually becoming something that I can legitimately use for writing. Yes, the KB is pretty cramped, and the shift keys aren’t exactly where I expect for them to be, but with practice, I can probably get up to 60-70 words per minute, which is amazing.

After the stop at MicroCenter, I went over to visit Herb in his new assisted living place. It’s a pretty good setup for him, and is close to Jenny and me. He’s got a small bedroom/office in one room, and kitchen/living room in another, and a good-sized bathroom. Pretty homey, all things considered, and he’s got caregivers around the clock, which is excellent. I helped him get his wireless printer set up and gave him a ream of paper (I’ve got more than I’ll ever use). Jenny was also there, so we visited for a bit before I came home, watched some television, did some laundry, and hit the sack.

Printers were the bane of my existence at work today. About a week ago, one of my firms decided to swap two printers. Normally, this isn’t a big deal, and I would just have to change their names in the group policy that pushes them out to workstations. Something went wrong with the policy, however, and I spend much of last week trying to get things working. Not only did the two printers not swap like they were supposed to, but people started losing OTHER printers. I got a frantic call from the client admin this morning saying that nobody on the second floor of the building had any printers.

So I spent all day trying various things to figure out what the hell was going on. Between 5:30 and 6:00 I think I finally got things working normally. It’s my hunch that the policy was never set up correctly when the firm came on board two months ago. I’m guessing that the on-site people manually installed everybody’s printers and nobody noticed that the policy wasn’t working until something had to change. When I made that change, all of the problems came to light.

It was, to put it mildly, a frustrating day.

I did get a little bit of time during the day to do some more work on a powershell script that I’ve been writing, and that was fun. I’m trying to, basically, rewrite the registry editor so that I can modify specific user hives in remote terminal servers. There are probably a hundred other (better) ways to do what I’m trying to do, but I’ve never used Powershell as much as I should have when I was managing systems, and learning a new language is a nice break during otherwise monotonous days.

Tomorrow will be another stressful day – we’re migrating four firms to Office 365. Two of my guys are in the O365 phone queue for expected heavy traffic, and two others are on a project in Florida, so my team will be severely short-handed.

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Tuesday: The weather took a turn for the cool this morning. I think it was in the low 50s when I got up and hovering around 60 when I left for work. Never got warmer than the low 70s.

Work itself wasn’t too bad. I had to do a few more tweaks for the printers that have taken up much of the last week, but got that out of the way early this morning. The rest of the day was spent closing tickets and helping my team with their own. Also got a little bit of work done on my Powers he’ll script and though of a few things that I can add to it.

Learned from one of my team that our team entry into last week’s Mega Millions drawing actually bore some fruit! We bought 9 tickets as a team on Friday as a part of a team-building exercise (went out to dinner at Dave & Busters), and we won $200. Not a billion bucks, but not bad. Of course, nobody won the whole thing, so tonight’s drawing, as you may know, is the largest jackpot ever at over $1.6 billion. Yes, I do have tickets – bought twenty of the things on my own. If I win, maybe I’ll throw some cash at my team.

I got home fairly late tonight – somewhere between 7 and 7:30 – and didn’t do much at all. Watched some television, washed some dirty dishes, and now I’m in bed. Maybe I’ll be a billionaire when I wake up.

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Wednesday: Not a billionaire. Not even a millionaire. In fact, on the twenty lottery tickets that I had – that’s 106 numbers altogether, I matched exactly…none. Oh well. Back to the grind, I guess.

It was nippy today for a while. Tomorrow is supposed to be nippier, with a high in the 60s. I’m not sure if it got over 70 today, but I was inside for most of the day, so I was comfortable in my Downtown Magnetawan tee and jeans. I had high hopes of closing out a bunch of tickets today, but things kept getting in the way and I honestly don’t know what my final numbers were.

Did an interview from 4 to 5:30. Nice kid, but he won’t be working for us. The three of us who interviewed him were unanimous in our opinions that he has absolutely no computer skills, in spite of his degree in cyber security.

Learned this afternoon that I have to do one-on-one meetings with my team before 11/15 – which in my case means before 11/1. So every day between tomorrow and next Friday will be spent in preparing – gathering metrics, listening to phone calls, reading ticket summaries, etc. Not my idea of a good time. We’ll also be migrating firms to Office 365 every night from tonight until the end of the year, which is going to cause high ticket loads every morning. This is the biggest project the X-Company has ever attempted, and I don’t think it’ll be a lot of fun, but it does need to be done.

I tied the registry portion of my Power Shell project into the lookup portion of it today, and it’s working quite well. This tool may actually wind up being really REALLY useful for my team.

Got home fairly late again tonight – somewhere around 7 – and make a couple of chicken sandwiches to eat while watching “The Newsroom” on Prime Video. That was it. Sitting in bed now and am about to be lying in bed. Just waiting for the kitties to settle in.

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Thursday: It was indeed a little cold today, with highs in the mid-60s and an unrelenting breeze. Normally, I would love that, but I underestimated the prognosticators and wore a tee shirt to work – did not bring a jacket. Of course, it was completely comfortable in the office, but my breaks outside were cold.

Tried to prepare for my 1-on-1 meetings with my directs for about half of the day, worked on tickets for most of the other half, and had my own 1-on-1 with my boss, where I learned that I’m doing pretty good. We talked about my future plans – whether I’d stick with the management path or jump to an upcoming escalations specialist spot. I said that, in my heart of hearts, I’m a techy; but that I’m determined to see if I can get comfortable in an admin role. That being the case, I do not intend to apply for the ES role when it comes up.

Turns out that I’ve got the inside track to a management promotion as we continue to add level 1 employees. My boss doesn’t want to have more than 12 directs. As we add more L1s, we’ll break them up into more teams, each with a team lead (leads currently report to my boss). The plan is to put another level in between the L1 leads and the Service director (my boss), and that’ s where I’d go. The leads would report to me and I’d report to the service director.

As I grow more comfortable in this role, I can see where that position would be more to my liking – dealing with intelligent technical leads without having to also deal with the daily grind of dealing with newbies who may or may not have a future in tech. Certainly something to think about.

We also talked about our respective personalities and how we approach our leadership positions. Turns out that both of us harbor inner thoughts that we’re frauds, which is oddly comforting. So I’ll soldier on and continue to work on my leadership and motivational skills (or lack thereof), and will continue to try to make this a new 2nd-act career.

At the end of the day, my friend Schuyler and I dug into my Power Shell project and tweaked and played until after 6:00. That being the case, I didn’t get home until close to 7:00. Made a shepherds pie for dinner (very good), did some dishes, and watched a hilarious mockumentary about a terrible survivalist. It was called, I think, “Tex Montana Will Survive.”

Got in bed with the intention of watching some college football, but it appears that it is not on a local (non-cable) channel, so I guess I’ll just go to sleep.

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Friday: A cold, drizzly day to end out the work week. At least I was smart enough to wear a rain coat today.

Worked on tickets for most of the day. Had one 1×1 meeting at around 11:30 and got some coding done late in the day, but for the most part, I zoned out to tunes and worked on problems. Had one guy not show up for work – he sent me a picture of the side of his car, said that he was hung up and waiting for AAA. 2 hours later said that AAA had just picked him up (this was a also at around 11:30), but he never came in. Very smart guy. Good guy. And this is his third unexcsused absence in two months and the second this week. We’ll be having a meeting on Monday, which I do not want to have. But… I wanted to manage people, right?

I got home by 6 o’clock or so and it was 60 inside the house. Hated to do it, but I was sort of tired of being right on the verge of cold, so I turned on the heat (set to 68). It’s the first time I’ve had it on since probably March, and the earliest that I can remember turning it on. My Nest thermostat needed something different, though, and I’m interested to learn if it handles heating as well as it handled cooling all summer. The heat has been off for the last hour or so, so I’m not overly concerned yet about my natural gas bill. Plus, we’re supposed to rebound and be back in the 70s by tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, I don’t have many big plans for the weekend. Going to fix Jenny’s toilet on Sunday – replace a flapper, I think – and will probably start organizing things tomorrow for my trip next week. Will probably also go somewhere tomorrow afternoon to watch some football, play trivia, and hoist a few. At some point, I need to buy toilet paper and clean my master bath.

Call it the weekend of the toilet.

So I’ll wrap this up now and call this experiment of nightly updates to my blog, using my phone as a monitor and a tiny Bluetooth keyboard as an input device, a rousing success. Had I known how much I could use the phone for if I attached it to a keyboard, I probably would’ve picked up the latter years ago. It will definitely come in handy on off-the-grid vacations in the future.

With that, I close this entry and prepare for sleep. I’ll pick up this tome next week!

Back to Creation

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Today’s featured image is one that I took in July, 2011, of a couple of cats on my deck.  I have no particular reason for using it.  I just did.

Much of yesterday and this morning was dedicated to website design, build-out, and modification. You’ve probably noticed differences in this’yere blog – hamburger menu to categories, droplist for archives, etc.  I’m currently trying to get a plug-in to work that will allow me to embed files directly from my OneDrive, but have so far not had much luck.  Email has been sent to the plug-in’s developer.

Yesterday, I made some huge strides on getting GoPaladins.com to look more like I want it to look.  It’s now running completely on a BootStrap base, which is something that I’d just started learning about when AT&T dropped the hammer, and I haven’t had the time to fool around with stuff like that since joining the X-Company, so putting the big site on that code is forcing me to dig into it a bit and figure things out – which I enjoy doing.  Still a lot to do on that site if it’s even going to approach the functionality of the old one that GoDaddy broke; but the original was years in the making.  I’m taking baby steps with the new one.

One said baby step was the purchase of a new monitor yesterday morning.  The television that I was using wasn’t getting the job done, and is slowly failing (colors get all wonky, which is not good when you’re designing sites and/or editing photos), so I splurged and bought a 34″ curved display at MicroCenter.  Truth be told, I was considering doing that anyway, in order to make it not only possible but actually preferable to work from home, which I think I’ll now start doing one day a week.  The monitor is wide enough for me to treat it like two monitors, and it’s got software that lets me break it up into different windows – so I can use half of it for a browser and split the other side into quarters for two additional programs (a ticketing window and a remote control window, for example) and not have to spend my time hunting for the stuff that I need.  It’s also at a good height, which is very nice.  I spent 6 hours in front of it yesterday and didn’t have a headache OR a backache.  Money well spent.

Have a rehearsal with the Gwinnett Wind Symphony this afternoon, which should be interesting.  Haven’t touched my tuba in probably 6 months, and we’re playing Schoenberg and some other weird stuff.  Atonal garbage for the most part, but I need to get my tuba chops in shape for an upcoming Easter gig.  The concert, by the way, is next week.

I felt terrible this morning because I woke up convinced that it was Monday and I’d forgotten to go to the one rehearsal that I told the director I would make.  Put me into kind of a funk as I fed the cats, did my potty business, and prepared to take a shower before finally realizing that it’s Sunday.  Once I figured that out, I went back to bed, much to the delight of all three cats.

I’m considering mowing the front lawn today.  Also need to do some laundry.  And maybe try making some cheesy beef macaroni stuff in a crock pot just to see if it’ll work.  Or I could do it the regular way.  Rehearsal goes from 6-8, so I doubt I’ll be eating afterwards.

Well….that ought to do it for today.  Not much to put down here other than the fact that it was in the 30s this morning, which blew me away.  It has since gone up to nearly 70 in the sun, but still feels rather chilly.  I must be getting old.

In Praise of Waze

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As a rule, I like software.  Installing a new program – or even reinstalling old programs – has always been sort of a Christmas morning thing for me.  Building out a new computer and then deciding what software to install just gets me pumped up.  Outside of playing my horn, there’s not much I’d rather do than install (and then play with) software.

That being said, I rarely like a program so much that I’m willing to give it unsolicited props.  It’s not often that a computer program, much less an app on a phone, literally changes my life.  Microsoft Access did in the early 90s.  It provided a combination solution for my love of databases and my desire to write code and launched me on a career that, to some extent, continues to this day.  Kindle (or, more generally, any book-reading application) changed the way that I read books.  Sure, I generally have one or two paperbacks in the bathroom, but I’ve been carrying libraries on my PDA/phones since the late 90s, and whenever I have 5 or 10 minutes of down time, I open a book and read a few pages.  Never really did that before eBooks hit the scene.

And now there’s Waze, an app that I installed on my phone just over a week ago, after my commutes to and from work had begun to convince me – seriously – that I would have to quit my job before I had a stroke (or just a nervous breakdown).  I was complaining about my drive to one of the guys who was hired on the same day as I was, and he casually tossed out, “Just get Waze.”

I had to google the thing.  Thought it was spelled “Ways,” which would make sense for a mapping application.  Then I found it.  Read about it.  Installed it on my Windows phone.  And couldn’t get past the initial agreement screen because it was so poorly written.

Turns out the Google had purchased Waze a few years ago and had stopped supporting Windows phone.  But I was so intrigued by the idea of a crowd-sharing mapping program that I took my Android phone, which I had had fixed after it broke last year, but had never put back into service, up to the AT&T store and told them to make it a real phone again.

That’s right.  I abandoned Windows phone just so I could try this app.  And I made the right choice.

The first day that I used Waze to drive to work, it started me out in the “wrong” direction.  Literally had me turning left at the end of my road, away from work, instead of right.  But I thought to myself, “What the hell.  It’s going to take me an hour anyway.  I might as well see something new.”

Would you believe that I got to work in under 30 minutes?  Or that, except for the last 1/2 mile – which is always going to be gridlocked – I wasn’t stuck in traffic at all?  Or that I was regularly exceeding the speed limit, driving on little back roads that I didn’t even know existed?

I thought it was a fluke.  “Wonder what it’ll do to get me home,” I thought.  At 6:00 in the evening, after all, there’s NO WAY to get from Alpharetta to Duluth in under 75 minutes.

Waze got me home in under 40.  I was blown away.  I actually walked through the door of my house with a smile on my face.

So I used Waze for a few days going back and forth to work, and then decided to try it out on last weekend’s GBB tour through Alabama and Tennessee.  It worked okay.  Pretty much gave me the same directions as my Garmin, which is the go-to GPS for my long trips.

That is, it gave me the same directions until my trip home from Chattanooga last Sunday afternoon.  I’m cruising down 75 and Waze suddenly chirps at me “Standstill ahead.  Take exit blah blah and go WAAAAAY the hell out of your way.”

I paraphrase.

Since I didn’t have to be anywhere until Monday morning, I gave Waze the benefit of the doubt, and I took exit blah blah – which is the exit that I used to take when going camping in the middle of nowhere – and let it lead me home.  Which it did, again finding little roads that I never knew about.  I got home at about the time I’d expected to.

As it turned out, there was a major pile-up on 75, about 5 miles south of where I exited.  Had I continued to follow my Garmin, I would’ve been stuck in traffic for about two additional hours.  This little FREE app not only determined that my traffic was about to suck, but also figured out a way around it on the fly.  My Garmin would’ve eventually told me that traffic sucked (probably when it was too late to change course), and then would have waited for me to tell it to find a new route.

Waze also sends me updates about things on the route.  It will tell me, for example, “There’s heavy traffic 9 miles away on Kimball Bridge Road” when I leave my house.  This is a given.  There’s always heavy traffic on KBR.  But it will also tell me, “Be careful.  There’s road kill in your way in a mile.”  Or “Police radar in two miles.”  And it’ll put a little icon on my map telling me where the dead dog or the cop is.  It warns of cars parked on the shoulder, water in the road, school busses stopping…anything that a normal person would notice – because it’s normal people updating the thing.

And so I sincerely offer this blog post in praise of Waze.  It has definitely changed my drive, made me a happier person, and – possibly – lengthened my life.

Thank you, whoever invented this wonderful program.