Privacy and the internet

Privacy is a topic I think about a lot.  My job is to use data to understand behaviour, and often that data is from websites.  So it might seem a little odd that this site contains not only my name but also my email, phone number and address - more than enough information to generally make my life a pain, should you be that way inclined.  I've even had phone calls from friends saying 'did you realise your phone number is on the internet, you should get it off so as to avoid annoying phone calls'.

When I first started using the internet I posted anonymously.  It quickly became clear though that if I wanted my arguments to be taken seriously I had to attach my name to them.  So about twenty years ago I stopped being anonymous and started using the internet in such a way as my posts were easily traceable back to me.

This had some interesting effects - one was that a long time ago I realised everything I wrote would be archived forever, which made me substantially more deliberate about what I wrote.  For instance in this post from 1994 I am writing something which, while I might look back and cringe at my naievity, is at least fairly well written and trying to be helpful.

Similarly posting my email address to the internet means I get a lot of spam.  I've long ago stopped counting for various reasons such as intermediate SMTP servers acting as filters, but I still get around a thousand a day.  However all that's really meant is gmail has had lots of training on blocking spam from my inbox - I only actually see about one spam a week.  Before gmail I used crm114 for the same purpose with a higher accuracy.  
That's the downside of putting your address out there, but what about the upside? Anybody who finds what I say interesting can send me an email and I've had hundreds of great conversations as a result.  I also try to keep the same email address so people can email me using the same contact details I've had for the last 15 years.  That means if someone is visiting the country again or similar they can trivially get in touch.

My phone is the same.  Since putting my phone number on the internet I've had zero nuisance phone calls and three calls from people that wouldn't have been able to find me if it wasn't for the information being easily accessed.

Finally have you ever thought how hard it is to keep that information completely off the internet?  Many people put their CV on the internet somewhere and most CVs have their phone number in them, so a search for "Firstanme Lastname" CV is likely to turn up most people's phone numbers with a bit of effort.  If all you're succeeding at doing is making it a bit harder for people to find your details then think about this:  are automated spam robots going to work harder to search for your details, or old friends that are paying a flying visit to the city you're in?  If you can't win, you may as well get as many benefits as possible from losing.

You Need A Budget

About fifteen years ago my wife and I had a budget that worked.  

We had a very little income yet we managed to pay for my flights down to university and other planned expenses while saving more than we managed in later years on a far higher income.

The reason was the expenses were known and planned for - a flight cost $200 so we set aside $10 every week until we had enough.  If one week we simply couldn't set aside $10 then we either had to set aside more later or delay the flight.  Everything was meticulously tracked in a grid paper excercise book.

The next year we upgraded to using a computer and began coding every purchase yet somehow we ended off in less control.  Over the years we tried many different pieces of software -  Excel, Quicken, Heaps!  GnuCash, KMyMoney, Xero Personal and iBank.  Yet somehow every year we found ourselves saying 'why are these systems worse than what we used to do in Hastings'.

Recently I triad yet another piece of software - YNAB (short for You Need A Budget) and I suddenly realised what we had been doing wrong ever since we converted to computerised budgeting.  Put simply, all the other software is based on expense tracking - after a bit of careful use it will tell you where you've been going wrong.  YNAB is fundamentially different, it tells you in advance whether you have enough money in the budget to buy something.  

The is exactly what we had been doing in Hastings and this little tweak to my personal workflow makes all the difference.  Every time I get paid, I sit down with my wife and agree where the money will go and then do my best to stick to that for the month.  What that means is that instead of finding out at the end of the month that I've say spent too much on groceries, I know in advance of going to the supermarket that we're tracking badly on groceries and I need to be careful.

It has also highlighted that from a business perspective I have been tracking expenses rather than budgeting there too.  Again all transactions are carefully coded to accounts and I monitor how much is spent in each account but I have never sat down and said: "ok, I'm getting $20k on the 12th and I'm going to divide it up like this."

Resuscitating this blog

This is the first post in about a year.  That's mainly because for that is I've been unbelievably busy since moving to Auckland with a more demanding job, a much longer commute and a baby at home.  The other reason is that the software I had been using - iWeb - only runs on my home computer and has been discontinued by Apple.

I started writing websites in 2004 having taught myself HTML.  This website had its first pages written in HTML using vi while I should probably have been writing research papers.  But as the web got more complex with javascript, and I concentrated on less geeky endeavours, I shifted to easier to use software.  However it is a little bit frustrating that HTML continues to work perfectly but I have to move on from more modern tools because the latest computers can't run them properly.

Anyway I have now got over that and shifted to an online editor (squarescape) which seems pretty easy to use so far and can be updated from anywhere.  The plan is that the ability to post from anywhere will mean I actually get around to doing it. 

ITUNES ON AN EXTERNAL DRIVE

I had hoped to never mention IT on this site, but I’ve run iTunes on an external drive for a number of years with numerous problems and got frustrated by how little help I could find on the internet.  Being a firm believe that complaining without fixing an issue is just whining, I thought I’d post my tips and tricks below.

Firstly, I’ve chosen to store my music on an external hard drive (generally NAS) for quite a few years now.  There’s quite a few benefits to this approach: You don’t have to worry about your music collection growing (since you can just keep adding hard drives); you can access your music from any computer on the LAN; you can easily take your music with you by just picking up the drive.

Like many people, iTunes is my media player of choice.  iTunes supports using a custom folder for music (under Advanced) but unfortunately it has a few very poorly thought out implementation details that mar its effectiveness with a remote music collection.

iTunes stores metadata about its music collection in an XML file, including whether the track is where it is supposed to be.  Should the drive not be available (off the network for instance), iTunes will unhelpfully decide that every track in your music collection is now orphaned.   

Fortunately, it is possible to force iTunes to realise its mistake without manually double clicking on every single file.  Firstly, turn off ‘keep iTunes folder organised’; next turn it on again; and finally choose ‘consolidate library’.  

Another trick is that iTunes sometimes forgets about some of your albums.  I haven’t fully diagnosed what causes this yet except that it happens most regularly with music names containing non English characters (e.g. accents).  My suspicion is that it relates to how Apple implements special characters over NFS differing from how it implements them when the drive is direct-attached, though I’ve also had the issue after iTunes crashes.

The solution is fairly simple.  iTunes has quite good duplicate detection with silent skipping during import, so simply ‘import’ your entire music folder and you should only end up importing the files that iTunes forgot about.

FAMILY

It occurred to me that I have nothing on this site about my family.  This isn’t entirely coincidental, the site is intended to contain information which is of interest to others.  However, the state before this post seemed to be omitting a large chunk of my life.

So, I live half-way up a hill with my wife (Andrea), two year old son (Nathan) and three cats.  I can’t say if we’re a typical family or not as I’m not really sure what typical is.  Nathan does seem a lot more boisterous than other kids his age, but then it’s pretty hard to tell. You can see the jigsaw in the photo, woodworking tools are one of the few things that keep him entertained

Not Attending the Auckland Open

I’ve always been competitive so it’s unsurprising that I would end up going to tournaments and entering competitions.  But the go tournaments have become more than that to me - I’ve met many friends through them and they’re about the only event where the whole go community in New Zealand gets together.

This weekend the Auckland Go Club held the open and I stayed home.  Well, not quite, I got a babysitter and went out to a cooking class run by Julie Biuso.  

I feel like I’ve copped-out, and I suppose I have. 

WAGC 2011

The day began with hourly jumps out of bed to check the time in case the alarm clock failed, followed by 4:20AM when it worked.  

With much gratitude to Suzanne for taxi service I had a quick shower and even with the main road being closed I got to the airport with fifteen minutes to spare at 5:15AM.  At least I thought I did, the check-in desk told me to go away until at least 5:30 so I wandered around the airport getting a coffee but not a camera - though for $200 I wish I had saved the argument the night before.

Getting to Auckland was uneventful, though I was surprised that without more than quick window-shopping I arrived at the lounge as the flight to Narita was called.

The flight was under half full - earthquake related? But unfortunately the seat next to me was occupied so I got a fairly squashed flight.  I largely managed to keep my focus on studying during the flight but I suspect I wasn’t giving the problems my full attention.  Towards the end I got too tired and allowed myself a small glass of wine and a sappy movie.

An event inflight worth mentioning was my neighbour had to be put on oxygen which made me worry how little was being pumped into the cabin.  Apart from that I had an uneventful flight.

Navigating the airport turned out to be far easier than I had feared.  The customs officer even seemed genuinely interested in me attening an Igo tournament and the limousine bus driver had no trouble understanding where I wanted to go.  I ended up on the 17:35 without mishap although being unable to contact Asami and let her know I was an hour early was a worry.

Fortunately I needn’t have worried, she had got my emails fine - it turns out Japan doesn’t have SMS so the texts went nowhere and she only replied via email which of course I didn’t get.  Otherwise the bus journey was enjoyable.  I was surprised how like NZ the countryside is, the bush has fewer shrubs and the trees are slightly different but the feel is similar.  The rice paddies are obviously different to pasture but then they serve a similar purpose.

Another surprise for me was how familiar all the cars are.  Germany has European cars while China has Chinese - the mix of cars would have looked normal in Wellington.  The only difference is a sort of squarish car which is very popular.  They also had a decent range of ages, I had an idea that the Japanese got rid of their old things but apparently not.  I did notice they all had GPS - even the cheap ones - and many had versing cameras.

As we got closer to Tokyo the countryside gave way to factories and other industrial buildings.  I couldn’t see as much as I would’ve liked because the express ways have sound barriers that also cut out most of the light.  What I did see was on a scale you wouldn’t get in NZ - vast factories where thousands must work.  I also saw a collection of about a dozen apartment blocks all huge and identical.  The difference was striking compared to the countryside just fifteen minutes drive away.

Driving in was also made interesting by the loud, self-confident American sitting opposite me on the bus.  I learned how he plans to transfer funds away from their Japanese subsidiary because they were being mismanaged, how he used to work for MIT media lab, and how business decisions in Osaka came from a single executive making a call and passing it down the line but in Tokyo the decisions need consensus across the management team.  How accurate this is I don’t know but his junior colleague was certainly lapping it up.

I did notice that the stories people tell of office workings staying late appear to be correct wit most still at least half occupied at 7PM.  I believe the workers were less senior based on the small desks, lots of paperwork and conservative dress but maybe I’m applying NZ business standards inappropriately.

Meeting Asami went well with her taking me and her mum to a ‘quintessentially Japanese’ ramen bar in which I was able to order every aspect of my meal, pay, eat and leave without having to even look at another person - let alone speak.  Apparently it’s popular with Japanese businessmen worn out meeting people all day so they can eat without interacting.

Asami’s mum’s apartment was not what I expected.  It contained a German-style tablecloth, a whole dresser full of teacups and just didn’t feel particularly Japanese.  Asami showed me around my apartment which had a similar feel.

As soon as she left I realised I had mislaid my glasses which led to about an hour of absolute hilarity.  Firstly I carefully searched the entire apartment end-to-end, then I did it again trying to retrace my steps, and again.  By this point I was exhausted and thought maybe I’ll have more luck after a sleep.

Unfortunately unlocking my suitcase’s combination was far beyond my eyesite at night without glasses even after I played games like ‘guess which looks most like a zero’ and trying all likely combinations.  I also tried photographing it but without the flash I couldn’t hold still enough and with it all I could see was reflection.  

Exhausted I thought I would have a shower and just go to bed but in my clothes but I couldn’t get the hot water heater working.  So I had a cold shower which wasn’t much fun but did awaken me sufficiently to thinking of using the camera’s zoom rather than trying to take a photo.  This worked (abiet slowly) so I now had toiletries and pyjamas - things were looking up.

That off my mind, I found my glasses almost immediately - on the toilet roll holder - and so went to bed contented at about 23:00, roughly 23 hours after I had got up.

The bed itself was comfortable.  The pillow was really interesting, instead of down it’s filled with a beanbag like mix of plastic bits.  Remarkably it’s very comfortable.

24-5-2011

Of course I woke at 6.

On Learning

I’d like to begin with a disclaimer.  I have done a lot of learning but very little of it has being about learning and so these rambling observations are simply my opinions based on a few years of watching other people and thinking about how they’re learning.  Also, I’m going to use playing go for most of my examples - mostly because there are many learning approaches available and how much you’ve learned can be quite precisely measured.

There is a popular saying that practice makes perfect.  I think it’s dangerously incorrect; I have seen people learn things extremely quickly with very little practice and other, smarter people keep practicing for hours a day and yet never get very far.  Certainly time can help, but only if well spent - I think bad practice is far worse for you than no practice.