I replaced my Pixel 3XL with a Pixel 5 this fall, and having used it a couple of months now I think that overall Google did a good job with it (although I’m admittedly biased). Things I like:
- The lower price tag. Processors are fast enough and displays are good enough that you can get a great phone experience without a bleeding edge device. Admittedly I don’t play graphics-intensive games on my phone.
- The form factor. Getting rid of the notch (and ditching Soli from the Pixel 4) allows the display to go edge-to-edge, allowing a large display with a smaller device. As a result, the phone feels comfortable in hand.
- Battery life. I mostly spend my time on wifi these days instead of the cell network (ah, the joys of sheltering-in-place), but even so the Pixel 5’s battery lasts almost 5 days for me, compared to 2-3 days for my Pixel 3XL (caveat: I turn my phone off at night).
- Rear fingerprint sensor: yes, it’s old school, but it works, and it works well (fast and reliable). And it works when wearing a mask.
- Lack of Soli: Soli was little more than a series of gimmicks that sucked up battery. I had my fill of overly-gimmicky features working for Samsung, so I’m glad it’s gone.
- Lack of bloatware: I still don’t understand why people put up with bloatware jammed onto their phone by OEMs and carriers.
The biggest downside is that the phone is slightly slower to process photos when taking pictures. It hasn’t interfered with my photo-taking (yet?), but it is noticeable. It might bother me more if I could actually travel and take pictures. Otherwise it’s a solid upgrade over both the Pixel 3 and 4 (which I haven’t personally owned but have used as a development platform for work).
In fitting weather for Q5 2020, the Bay Area (and California as a whole) has been getting very little rain during out “wet” season. San Jose’s airport has recorded just 17% of its average rainfall, and other regions around the Bay are only slight better: 20-30% of average. Meanwhile the California snowpack is at 52% of average. Right now it looks like we’re in for a drought, with water rationing on top of everything else going on.
On the one hand, it’s likely that the drier conditions will make the fire season this fall worse. On the other hand, the fire season also gets worse if we get a lot of rain that causes vegetation to grow like crazy but then dry out into kindling. So maybe that aspect will just end up a, um, wash.
We discovered recently that our daughter never set up voicemail on her iPhone. No problem, we thought, we’ll just set it up now; it’ll only take a few minutes. But whenever we tried, we got an “unknown error” message. Ok, that’s a bit weird, we thought; we’ll check the website and see if we can figure out what’s wrong. After some poking around, we find a technical support page that diagnosed the issue: voicemail wasn’t set up on her account, and we had to call customer support to get them to add it. Now we thought: WTF? How do you not have voicemail set up on an account, and why do we have to call? If it needs to be added, shouldn’t it just be a toggle someplace? Click here to enable voicemail?
Ok, fine, we thought, and dialed. “We’re experiencing unusually high call volumes.” Uh huh. Twenty minutes later, I actually get a person on the line, who claims that voicemail is already set up on the line. And yet it’s not working. He says he’ll forward me to tech support, at which point I get put back on hold. And after fifteen minutes I give up.
Fast forward to today. “We’re experiencing unusually high call volumes.” Dear AT&T: if your call volumes are always high, they are no longer unusual. Hire more staff. After twenty minutes I get a person, who starts to help me and then (accidentally?) disconnects the call. Great. Twenty more minutes of waiting to get to a person, who spends thirty minutes trying to help me, only to give up and tell me he’s going to forward the call to tech support. Thirty minutes later I get through to a person, who pokes around in their system and successfully fixes voicemail support on her line.
So why did AT&T cost me two hours of my life? Apparently if you don’t set up voicemail within 60 days of adding a line, they disable voicemail. But it still shows as attached to the account, so customer service reps are clueless as to how to fix the problem. You need to reach a human who (a) knows that AT&T disables voicemail and (b) knows how to re-enable it correctly.
Get with it, AT&T. If you’re going to have this policy of disabling voicemail, its incumbent upon you to make sure you customer support people know how to re-enable it. Even better, just make it a fricken’ on-off toggle in your account that you can fix yourself with a couple of clicks. Or just cancel the policy; if your systems are even remotely well-designed, the service shouldn’t be consuming resources until it’s set up.
Reuters published an article right before Christmas about how Google is purportedly attempting to shape the messaging in the research papers published by its staff. First, an upfront disclaimer: I have no knowledge of Google’s publication processes, and I’ve been out of academic research for years. But I find the hand-wringing in response by some academics hilarious. News flash: for-profit companies do not fund research out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it to, y’know, make profit. Even if companies don’t explicitly shape the content of papers, researchers will do it implicitly. If you were a highly paid industrial researcher, would you really want to publish a paper that made your employer look bad? When you’re thinking about your yearly evaluation and promotion path?
Frankly, if you want total intellectual freedom, you need to do your own research and fund it yourself. Want to do research in industry? Companies have agendas. Government funding? If funding decisions are made by other academics, then you’re probably going to have to focus on trendy research topics. If they’re made by a single funding manager, then that manager’s agenda is determining acceptable research topics. And academics also need to be able to interest grad students in working on a problem (trendiness again).
Research is always shaped by external factors; don’t act shocked by it.
For the first six months of working from home, my work from home uniform was shorts and sandals. Why not? Online meetings only show you from the waist up. The only time I work socks was when I went biking or running.
In the last few months (hard to believe we’re coming up on 10 months of WFH) I’ve had to break out warmer clothes. Way back when I was actually going to an office, I chose clothes that weren’t too warm or too nice, since I commuted by bike (one nice thing about bike commuting in the winter: when it’s in the low 40s on your ride in, you don’t get sweaty if you’re wearing something breathable). But since that’s not an issue now, warm and cozy is the order of the day. My current favorites:
- I’ve swapped my sandals for slippers. My LL Bean Wicked Good Slippers have lasted for years and still keep my feet super comfy.
- I bought an LL Bean Chamois shirt a few years ago as a winter layer for use when kicking back at home. For when you want a warm flannel shirt.
- One more LL Bean shirt: on an early cold day I bought a fleece-lined flannel shirt. So warm, so toasty.
- At the end of last winter I bought a discounted fleece from Relwen. I only used it a few times then, but I’ve gotten a ton of use out of it this fall and winter.
It’ll be interesting to see if / how office fashion changes once we can actually spend time in offices again.
I knew of Shopify, but before this Christmas I’d never really encountered sites made with it. That’s largely due to my shopping habits: although I patronize smaller businesses in person, most of my online shopping is with large retailers who can afford to fully design and implement their own online store. But this Christmas I made an explicit effort to shop with small businesses, helped by an online “Christmas catalog” that Google assembled of recommended Black-owned retailers.
I ended up buying from seven of them, and they were all using Shopify to create their online store. The actual browsing experience was fairly varied, so at first I didn’t realize it. But the actual checkout and payment experiences were almost completely uniform (with only a few, small variations). The first couple of times it just struck me as coincidence; they might have been using a similar library, for example, to handle purchases. But by the third time it was stretching the bounds of coincidence, and I started actively looking at how the sites were built. Sure enough, they were using Shopify. All of them. And I have to say, the user experience was pretty good, and once I knew the pattern to look for, it actually raised my confidence in the businesses. I’d prefer a common processor handling payment details (and security) to a bunch of small businesses attempting to roll their own solutions.
Granted these sites probably aren’t representative of small businesses as a whole (they were from a list vetted by Google, after all), but Shopify is more prevalent than I realized. And now that I’m actively looking for its use, I suspect I’ll start identifying it in more places.
We have several Google home devices: a Google Home Mini that I got free from Spotify, the original Google Hub (now Nest Hub) that we bought primarily as a digital photo frame, and a Google Home Max that we bought during a 50% off sale to use as a speaker in our WFH office. All are perfectly lovely devices; I enjoy seeing old photos on the Hub, the Home Max has great sound (and it’s convenient to Cast to it from our laptops), and the Mini is useful for checking the weather when getting dressed.
But we almost never interact with the Assistant on any of those devices, and we’re clearly not alone; the Assistant team seems to be getting increasingly desperate to drive usage (disclaimer: I work for Google, but on the Android team; I have no idea what the Assistant team is up to). It started out with the Assistant tagging on “helpful” hints when I’d ask it the weather (“Did you know that…?”). That’d be fine if it happened once or twice, but the Assistant keeps doing it (at a guess there’s some inactivity threshold that I keep crossing; like I said, we don’t interact with the Assistant much). And there’s no way (at least no way I’ve found) to tell the Assistant “yes, I do know, I just don’t care, so stop bothering me”.
This week the Assistant crossed a new threshold: now when telling me yet again that it had additional capabilities I could use, it informed me that it was going to send me a notification with additional details. It’s apparently not enough to verbally nag me to interact with it more; now it’s starting to spam my other devices.
Neediness isn’t a good look for an “intelligent” assistant. Offer users suggestions and tips once or twice, then stop nagging them. Make it easy to find out how to leverage additional capabilities when users are interested. And focus on providing capabilities that offer users real value, rather than nagging them into using mediocre ones (or ones that the user just doesn’t need).
I had to swing by Google’s offices last week to pick up a device for prototyping. It was nice to see Google’s campus again. I miss our building; we didn’t even get to enjoy it for a full year before we had to abandon it! It was also depressing. The campus was empty and lifeless, when it used to be bustling with people and full of energy. I saw maybe three people wandering around, and one of them was a security guard. It made me miss seeing all my coworkers and having face-to-face conversations.
But hey, working from home all the time does have a few silver linings, right? It’s been over six months since I’ve worn socks (when I haven’t been running or biking). Same for pants; I’ve been in shorts since at least April. I bought a pair of hair clippers in May, and I’m pretty sure I’ll break even after my next home haircut. After that I’ll be saving money. And we’re already saving on car washes, having bought a sprayer for our hose in June. And I can wear a wider variety of my wardrobe to “work”, since I don’t have to worry about getting clothes sweaty from biking into work (we won’t talk about the exercise I’m not getting since I’m not biking to and from work).
The benefit I might be looking forward to the most is coming up. Since I prefer running in the afternoon and evening to running in the morning, I usually end up having to run in the dark with a headlamp starting in November. This year, though, I can just shift my work schedule and go running in the late afternoon and then just work a little later. So yes, I’ve been stuck at home for the last six months and for the foreseeable future. But at least I don’t have to go running in the dark this year.
The heat wave we’ve been having for the last week or so in the Bay Area finally seems to be breaking, and the cooler air off the ocean is clearing the smoke from the Glass Fire out as well (as least for now). I’m used to cooler weather in September from growing up in upstate NY; it’s just wrong to get a stretch of 90+ degree weather at the end of September and into October. And California’s wine country just can’t seem to catch a break; unless I’ve lost count (entirely possible; we’ve had so many fires this season), the Glass Fire marks the third time they’ve been hit with fires this year.
This week the forecast predicts we’ll cool down throughout the week, ending with a high near 70 on Saturday. I am seriously looking forward to some cooler weather. And there’s even a chance of rain (although not a huge chance), which I think we could all use at this point.
I’m hopeful the cooler weather will help the area finally get a break from the incessant fires, although fire season still isn’t over. It’d be nice to be able to actually close the Purple Air tab I’ve been leaving open in my browser. I think July was the last time I didn’t have Purple Air in a tab on at least one of my devices.
… like there are a bunch of fires blowing smoke in our direction. Sadly that’s not a dusting of snow, it’s a dusting of ash. Although it’s hard not to think “nuclear winter” at the moment; this weekend instead of unseasonably hot weather and unhealthy air, we’re going to have unseasonably cool weather (due to the smoke blotting out the sun) and healthy air.
jeff pierce 