Home Automation Reviews Galore

By Chris Bartek

Universal Devices ISY994i

After deciding the basic SmartHome Insteon Hub wasn’t going to cut it for my home hacking experiments, I decided to bring in the big guns. Universal Devices’ ISY994i is an incredible piece of home automation machinery, and worth every penny.

Everything you need, it does out of the box: Static IPs, remote capabilities, upgradability, complex scripting, and more. If you want to take it to extremes, you can add a Z-Wave dongle, ELK interface, and more. Plus, it has a wonderful REST API so you can easily write your own software and apps for it. It’d be nice if you could have it return JSON instead of XML, but hey, that’s a minor complaint.

First Alert OneLink SCO501CN-3ST + Insteon Smoke Bridge

This is the sort of stuff I look for in home automation. I don’t care about controlling my lights and fans, and other cheesy stuff; I mainly want to collect data, keep the house efficient, and alert me immediately if something has gone wrong. Imagine if your house was on fire or had a carbon monoxide leak, and you were able to receive an alert even when you were away from your house? Wouldn’t that easily be worth a few hundred dollars?

First Alert’s OneLink system doesn’t do this out of the box, but once you add SmartHome’s Insteon Smoke Bridge, you can do just that. Via scripts, you can send emails or texts explaining the scenario (fire or CO), that way you can check your cameras, call 911, etc.. It could save lives, and save your house.

Even without the Smoke Bridge, the OneLink system is a pretty advanced smoke detector system. Maybe not as advanced as the Nest Protect, but it doesn’t need to be either. It will warn you with voice when it detects an issue, and will broadcast it to every smoke detector in your home. That way, if your kitchen catches fire while you’re upstairs in bed, you are guaranteed to hear it and find out about it early, making evacuation much safer.

Why this solution and not the Nest Protect? I wanted something that would work with my Insteon network, and would look less like a big ugly box on my ceiling. This entire system also cost less than a single Nest Protect (minus the Insteon hub).

Insteon Leak Sensor

When I first moved into my house, disaster struck two weeks in. My tankless water heater suddenly decided to fail, and by fail I mean it burst a pipe and spilled water into the kitchen downstairs. A lot of water. Luckily I was there to shut off the main, otherwise it would have caused thousands of dollars in damage. Since then, I have lived in fear of the same thing happening again. But not anymore.

This leak sensor came with the Insteon starter kit I got, and I couldn’t be happier with the way it works. The second it detects water on the floor, it sends a notice to your Insteon controller, allowing you to take necessary action. For me, this means an email and text, but if I were inclined to do so, I could add an electronic valve to the main to allow my Insteon controller to shut off water to the house. Cool, right? Next, I want to buy a second one of these to put in the laundry room, where most of the water accidents tend to happen these days.

Every home should have two of these.

Morning Industry QF Series Deadbolt + SmartHome MorningLinc

This was my favorite of all purchases so far. This deadbolt allows you to electronically unlock your door in 3 ways: traditional key, keypad, and RF keyfob. The keyfob doesn’t work from more than 15 feet, but the keypad works great. I’m sure the regular keys work, but I don’t think I’ll ever need them.

Adding in the MorningLinc bridge to an outlet in the next room, I was able to easily link my Insteon home automation network to the deadbolt, so that I can set a schedule to automatically lock/unlock the door, lock it from the app I made, etc.. Really, this is the best part about the whole setup.

My only gripe with this setup is I’m unable to have Insteon query the device to see if it is currently locked or unlocked, and I have no way of auditing the system to see who has entered and left the house (you can set up to 10 unique codes). Also, if you try to make Insteon lock the door and it has been manually unlocked with the deadbolt (or vice versa), it will not trigger correctly. However, I was able to work around this by having my Insteon scripts run both commands at the same time, ending with the one I want. This forces the unit to synchronize, even if it occasionally has to run both commands one after another.

I love this thing, and I can’t imagine life without it. I only wish it had Bluetooth Smart or NFC support.

Skybell

I finally got around to installing my new wifi doorbell, which is a Skybell. It is one of those Kickstarter-y projects that came out of the gate with lots of bugs, but as of this writing, the firmware updates seem to have ironed out whatever it was people were complaining about. Mine had some problems out of the box, but once I got it going, it has proven fairly stable.

So the problems. First of all, when they say you need a 1.5mb upload capability on your ISP, they are serious. Unfortunately, my bargain Comcast account is 1mb upload, so it can sometimes choke on a connection. This will be made worse if you can’t get your wifi strong enough, which becomes a huge task when you have a brick house like I do, and the room the router is in is surrounded by brick walls on four sides (because it used to be a garage). My old repeater wasn’t doing the trick, so I upgraded to a Netgear EX6200 AC1200 High Power 700Mw Dual Band Range Extender, which is so amazing I should write a separate review about it. Seriously, this thing carries several houses away and barrels through brick.

Anyway, the Skybell. Syncing didn’t always work the first time, and often it would fail so many times it would get stuck in reset mode, which required me to unhook a wire from the low voltage transformer on my doorbell to hard reset it. Not a big deal, but kind of annoying. Once it syncs, you never have to do it again.

Now for the good: the doorbell notification works every time, immediately. Calling the camera to view it works most of the time even on my lousy internet connection. Listening and talking works. The quality of all three are generally not spectacular, but considering how small it is, it works pretty decent. Motion detection works, but all it does is trigger a doorbell notification, and that wasn’t really the way I wanted it to work, so I turned it off. What it ends up doing is it rings the bell automatically if someone sits there, and I was ending up with a few false positives since it sees cars driving past my house.

Overall, I like it, but what I’d really like is an open API. Not only would I love to be able to access it from third party software or a web browser, but I’d love to be able to access it directly without the use of their cloud. Mostly because, if Skybell went out of business, all I’d have left is a big ugly doorbell with no extended functionality.

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My Advice to Everyone

By Chris Bartek

Write.

There is so much emphasis these days on reading and how it will open up your life. And don’t get me wrong, it will. However, I think the best thing anybody can do for their careers is to write, and write well.

Looking back at the successes in my life, almost all of it had to do with writing. Awards and contests. Scholarships. Honors. Jobs. Promotions. In almost all of this, writing was involved. I’m not the greatest writer in the world… I can ramble, jump around, list things endlessly, and generally fail to end sentences, but the important thing is I’m comfortable writing and know how to convey a basic message. My advice to anyone who wants to get what they want out of life has always been to master writing as best you can.

Be a good speller; with spellcheckers integrated in everything, there’s no excuse for bad spelling.

Get good at grammar; understand capitalization and punctuation rules, and know where the apostrophe goes.

Be concise, but be complete. Don’t leave out details, but don’t go off on unimportant tangents.

Organize your thoughts. Have a main idea. Give supporting details. Structure your paragraphs so they make sense.

Bend the rules if you know what you’re doing. I break rules all the time if I think it will help my communication. Because sentence fragments.

Sound smart without sounding pretentious. There is nothing more amateurish than individuals who use recherché lexicon in order to impart an elementary communication of their mind. It makes you sound like an idiot.

Write poetry.

Life isn’t Twitter—write as much as you need to write, no more, no less.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Therefore, get a visual in your head and write what you see.

Start a blog. Own your thoughts and don’t be ashamed to make them public; just make sure to have the right ideas.

Before you open your mouth… research. Don’t let your uneducated opinions control your communications.

If you have writer’s block, you didn’t brainstorm properly. Organize your thoughts in Notepad and return to battle when you’ve got the map laid out.

Know when you’ve written enough, and shut up.

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Upcycle Your Old Smartphones and Tablets

By Chris Bartek

I’m not normally much of a hippie or a Martha Stewart type, but I somehow got to thinking about the technology graveyard in my closet. Everyone has one. You know, the one with your clickwheel iPod, the Kyocera phone with an LCD screen, or the 2 megapixel Sony camera. The stuff your phone replaced, and then two more phones replaced that before they themselves ended up in the graveyard.

So what’s in my tech graveyard? Lots of stuff I thought was amazing back in the day. A Casio Databank calculator watch, a 40gb Flashtrax, a 128mb MP3 player, a GP32, a Nokia N-Gage, and the list goes on. Also, two old iPods (1st Gen, 4th Gen) and an iPhone 3G. I got to thinking, you know, these iPods could live a new life as a tiny photo frame, or clock, or kitchen computer, or…

…maybe an IP camera? Is that even possible?

It is, actually.

In my attempt to turn these old iOS devices into IP cameras, I found a couple of apps that did the trick. The first one I tried was IP Cam Pro by Senstic. This one was all right, but I ended up going with ipCam by SKJM, which was a more compatible solution, and cheaper. Don’t let the reviews scare you, those people obviously don’t understand what an IP camera actually does. ipCam runs all the way down to iOS 4, which meant I could use the old iPhone 3G and iPod 4th Gen, but not the first gen Touch, so that one went back to the graveyard. However, once attached to a solution such as a Belkin video dock, you now have a working IP camera from something that was collecting dust. Be sure to set a static IP on the device and you’re all set.

I also attempted this with my old Android 2.3 phone, and it was even easier. I used IP Webcam by Pavel Khlebovich, which is an excellent piece of software, and free for what I needed it for. Of course, with Android you have true multitasking, which allows this program to hide in the background and start on bootup. This additionally allows you to give the old phone a secondary use while it sits in a dock, so I figured a photo frame / clock would be a great option. The app I chose was Photo Slides by Softick, which was also free and worked beautifully. As a bonus, you can set it to automatically start itself when connected to a charger, and close when disengaged, making it able to start on bootup and close itself if you want to remove it from the dock and use it as a surfing device. So from a cold bootup, it works 100% without having to configure or launch anything.

The Android solution of installing IP Webcam + Photo Slides ended up being an incredibly useful way to reuse a graveyard-bound smartphone. The iOS devices, on the other hand, can’t do anything but show the camera feed or show a blank screen, and neither of those keep it from being an eyesore. I wrote an email to the developer of ipCam to see if something could be done about that, but we’ll see. Knowing Apple, probably not.

Now my house seems to be covered in cameras, and my concerns start, since I don’t want to creep out visitors. However, I think the Android solution at least is a bit more elegant and discreet. People don’t get that big brother feeling in their stomach while staring at a smartphone, like they do staring at an IP camera hanging from the ceiling. And obviously, there are some places where the cameras should never be. In my house, for instance, the 2nd floor (all bedrooms) is a camera-free zone, and the computer rooms as well.

Anyway. I also had an iPad 3rd Gen laying around that only gets used when I’m developing stuff. Although I could go the ipCam route with it, I decided I always wanted a refrigerator with a tablet built in, but didn’t want to spend $4k for it.

The solution? I purchased a tablet refrigerator mount and a 10ft charger cable on eBay. Then I ran the cable around the fridge with neodymium magnets. Easy as that, and now my $400 fridge is a $4k fridge. It got me thinking, I’d like to make a “FridgeOS” app for it. Something with recipes, inventory, shopping list, and other goodies. Perhaps I’ll develop this another day. Perhaps one day I won’t be busy.

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The 21st Century Gentleman

By Chris Bartek

In the middle of one of those tired old “is chivalry dead?” arguments I got to thinking about what makes a modern gentleman. Given that chivalry is no longer part of what makes a gentleman (good riddance), it raises the question of how a classy gentleman could be defined these days. I think this is pretty much how I would define it, and by the way, in the spirit of equality, this list should generally apply to ladies as well.

Rule 1: Absolutely no fedoras. Being an obnoxiously-dressed neckbeard does not make one a gentleman. Unless you can successfully rock a zoot suit in your ’90s style ska band, don’t wear a fedora/trilby… and if you are in a ska band, you should really question the direction your life is going.

Rule 2: The modern gentleman rarely discusses religion and politics. When he does, it is discussed with tact and civility, and usually only with friends and family. A gentleman does not spread fake quotes through social media and complain about political correctness. He does not spend his time on social media whining about being short-changed by some race/gender/orientation. He does not post conspiracy theories on social media.

Rule 3: A gentleman brushes his teeth. Shaves. Smells nice. I don’t know why I have to post this, but a gentleman does not make public distasteful noises and/or smells with his body. For some reason IT staff have a hard time grasping this.

Rule 4: A gentleman has a go-to drink. Maybe he enjoys single malt whisky. Maybe he’s more of a mai-tai guy (no shame in that in the 21st century). If he’s creative, he has his own signature cocktails. He has something he can come home to after a hard day.

Rule 5: A gentleman is chivalrous… to everyone. Chivalry is dead not because it’s wrong to be nice to women, but because equal courtesy should be extended to men as well. Be respectful to all that haven’t lost your respect, but never be patronizing or sexist.

Rule 6: A gentleman respects that everyone has a different journey in life. Until you walk a mile in someone’s shoes, never accuse them of having some sort of privilege that you don’t, or that their lifestyle is inferior to yours. That’s tacky and rude. So what if someone was born into a rich family? So what if someone is on welfare?

Rule 7: A gentleman has hobbies, but doesn’t take them too far. Men are the worst at this. Don’t spend a large portion of your money to complete a video game collection or buy recreational drugs. Don’t have more cars than will fit in your garage. Don’t own 142 guns. And for the love of God, don’t buy giant inflatable ponies to keep in your bedroom.

Rule 8: A gentleman knows when to censor himself. Restrain yourself from overuse of expletives, or they lose their effect. A 21st century gentleman can curse sparingly, but not within earshot of unknown parties. Avoid discussions of genitalia, especially at the table. Art is art, but conversation is ultimately an art of restraint.

Rule 9: A gentleman can find social and intellectual well-being without drugs and alcohol, if necessary. A gentleman knows his limit and actively avoids getting drunk and obnoxious.

Rule 10: A gentleman is never a victim. A gentleman accepts their life as the sum of what they have put into it. It may not be exactly what they want it to be, but…

Rule 11: A gentleman is driven. They know what they want out of their life, and they spend every day trying to achieve. However, a gentleman is capable of relaxing and leaving work problems at work.

Rule 12: A gentleman has few enemies. They don’t start petty fights on social media. They forgive those who have wronged them, because having many enemies makes life even more difficult and emotionally draining.

Rule 13: A gentleman does not objectify the gender of his affection. However, he doesn’t allow the opposite sex to shame him when he wants to empower himself.

Rule 14: A gentleman is calm. He doesn’t freak out over things. A gentleman doesn’t get outraged every week on Facebook.

Rule 15: A gentleman is unique. You cannot place a gentleman into a subculture just by looking at him. He is not part of any collective. He is himself, and is comfortable being himself.

Rule 16: A gentleman is independent. He is organized and knows how to cook and clean when necessary. He doesn’t rely on others to carry him through life.

Rule 17: A gentleman surprises others with their compassion when it is not expected. He is kind and charitable.

Rule 18: A gentleman does not enter into a relationship he does not belong in.

Rule 19: A gentleman has healthy masculinity, but is not afraid of having a feminine side. Some may wear a scarf. Some may carry a man-purse. But no hipster may ever be a gentleman (see #15).

Rule 20: A gentleman does not boast about his finances, and lives a modest lifestyle.

Disclaimer: I am not the perfect gentleman, as I fail a few rules. Most people do. In my opinion, one should strive for as many of these as possible.

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My First World Problem

By Chris Bartek

My sense of smell is completely gone.

Apparently this happens after a long battle with the flu. It has been several months since I got over the worst sickness I’ve ever had in my life, and I still have not regained my ability to smell. It seems like it would be a trivial thing, but it has affected my life in unfortunate ways. My ability to taste food has been muted about 20-50%. I can’t tell if milk is expired. I can’t tell if the oven is burning. I can’t smell freshly-cut grass, a woman’s perfume, or summer flowers in the morning rain, or any number of random smells that unlock some faint memory from childhood you forgot you had. Honestly, it really sucks.

I guess I’ll see a doctor about it, but it’s probably one of those things that either comes back, or doesn’t. Once your olfactory nerves are damaged, that’s it, they’re gone forever. Sometimes I get hope, though. I can detect some smells if they’re pungent enough (pepper, vinegar, onions), but even then I think that is my nose reacting to those scents because of acid content, etc.. I can also sometimes detect some scents, but they do not smell the least bit correct… more like a moldy, mucus-y smell.

It could be worse, I suppose… I could have gone blind, or deaf, or lost a limb. Heck, people die from the flu all the time. But I still feel like I have to retrain myself to live life as best I can with what I have left.

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Wi-Fi Thermostats are Awesome

By Chris Bartek

There comes a time when a man is unsupervised for 2 weeks, and random household projects take place. Gutter cleaning, hedge trimming, pump re-piping, mysterious projects involving an angle grinder, and on top of all this, the start of what will become numerous home automation experiments.

Anyway, I made the purchase of a Wi-Fi thermostat. It is a Filtrete 3M-50, and it rocks. The same thermostat is also labeled as a Radio Thermostat CT50 and other models. I found mine as an open box model on eBay, figuring some poor guy bought it and couldn’t figure out the wiring. Judging by the few missing wire labels but otherwise perfect condition, I figured right.

Hardware installation was surprisingly easy. Thermostat wiring is somewhat standardized, although my Trane unit threw a curveball at me as far as the “C” wire, which happens to be the most important wire to get a modern thermostat working. On a Trane, it turns out this wire is labeled “B”, and it took some research to figure this out (even Nest’s website couldn’t determine my setup). Anyway, I put the 6 or so wires in their place, fired it up, and it has worked ever since.

The Wi-Fi setup is slightly weird, and maybe it doesn’t look as sexy as a Nest, but it works well, doesn’t need a battery, has a touchscreen, a scheduler, and an app to adjust temperature and scheduling settings. But the thing that sold me on it… get this, it has a well-documented JSON-based REST API. *drools uncontrollably*

Why did I buy this passé, beige, how-you-say… uninspired box when I could have bought a Nest? I guess this would be why…

1) Nest had no open API. The only info I could find was reverse-engineered. It looked nice though.
2) Nest requires the cloud. As far as I could tell, you can’t address it on your network directly.
3) I wasn’t sold on the automatic scheduling. It has to see you for that to work, and my thermostat is in a room with no real traffic.
4) Their website suggested it was incompatible with my wiring. This turned out to be untrue.
5) There are a lot of scary Amazon reviews out there. Either you love it, or it destroys your life (and freezes your pipes). Not much in-between.
6) It uses a lithium ion battery. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to replace the batteries on a thermostat every 3 years.
7) There was apparently a (forced) software update bug that bricked a lot of people’s thermostats in the middle of winter.
8) I don’t care what the hardware interface looks like… if it’s doing its job I shouldn’t have to look at it or touch it.

I’m not a Nest Labs hater or anything though. I like their Nest Protect product, even though it has a few problems of its own, and I may end up purchasing one or two of them. Heck, does anyone else make a Wi-Fi smoke detector?

So, I managed to write an extremely basic class in PHP that allows me to get and set the temperature, and I’ll be releasing it on GitHub soon as part of a big project I’m working on. A project which is getting closer and closer to release. 🙂

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#OneSpark #EdSpark #YearOfAwesome #lolhashtags

By Chris Bartek

So, since I’m not busy enough these days I decided to help out my friend Courtney with a project of hers she wanted to enter into OneSpark. If you’re not familiar with OneSpark, it’s a crowdfunding festival in Jacksonville that helps get innovation and investors in the same place, to help local projects get funded. That’s the idea at least, but in practice it’s more like an idea some rich bohemians came up with to get people to remember that downtown Jacksonville exists, while simultaneously not really managing to get anybody’s projects off the ground.

Alas, I promised myself this would not turn into a rant. 🙂

The idea we entered is a nifty one. It is an ABA Therapy App (in fact, that’s the name) that allows behavior analysts and therapists to work more efficiently with autistic children. Right now it supports manding, assorted flashcards, and analytics, but we want to do all sorts of useful things with the app. The prototype is currently written in jQuery Mobile, but it may be rewritten natively for the final version. All in all it is a pretty exciting project and we got a lot of great feedback. We also got some wonderful funding and met some great allies in our cause.

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This was all born out of a pact we all made called the “Year of Awesome.” I know that sounds like some kind of Honda used car sales event, but really all it is, is the promise that we’re going to have our twenties go out with a bang instead of a whimper. You know, get the ball rolling on stuff that should have been rolling years ago, like starting a business and building cool ideas. So this was a way to do just that, and I think we succeeded. Maybe we didn’t win prizes or anything, but we built something, attracted the investors we needed, and got a nice booth at EdSpark. And hey, we got more funding than most. Now there are some next steps to take care of, and you’ll soon be seeing some exciting new mobile projects from me.

The Year of Awesome is go.

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Moon Boogie

By Chris Bartek

My latest game involves driving a jumping pink jalopy around on the moon, whilst shooting heart-shaped bullets at aliens. Believe it or not, no LSD was involved in the making of this app.

Moon Patrol is one of my all-time favorite games (I even have the standup arcade game), so it was only a matter of time before I wrote my own version. It follows the same formula, but I changed a few things here and there. I actually wrote a Moon Patrol clone about a decade ago, but the source code got lost in a drive crash… this one is better anyway, haha.

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Get Moon Boogie for Android
Get Moon Boogie for iOS

You’ll notice the iOS version costs 99 cents, while the Android version is free. The reason for this is the Android version is way easier to port than the iOS version, and I don’t have to pay $99 a year for a developer license like I do with Apple. Also, what I’ve noticed is Android users expect everything to be free (like Windows and Linux software), while iOS users are fine with paying a buck or two (like MacOS software). So, lots of reasons.

The holes were the hardest thing to implement. The game is extremely difficult, even for me, the guy who made the game. I spent probably 3 days trying to track down a weird Android bug, but I spent even longer cursing at Xcode over a file path bug. One final note: Disco Nick is hidden in the game, as usual.

Enjoy.

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It’s Good to be Back

By Chris Bartek

So it’s been a few months since I’ve been back home now.

Home.

For those of you that don’t know, I moved from Atlanta back to Jacksonville in November and no longer have to live in a small house with 6 other people. I no longer have to take huge trips from ATL to JAX. I no longer have to deal with Atlanta traffic. I no longer have to come home to my house every few months and see what an overgrown disaster my lawn has become. I no longer have to pay for a house I don’t even live in. I can now live in my own home, in my own city. With money not being squandered on living in two places at once.

Life is good again.

That’s all I really wanted to say, is my life is awesome. Maybe it’s the mai tais talking, but I’m in love with life, and I can’t wait until summer.

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All this pretense. It has to stop.

By Chris Bartek

.guru domain names? That’s so 2006. Why not .rockstar, .ninja, or .zombiecloudevangelist? How am I supposed to be a pretentious expert on the internets with only one vanity TLD to choose from?

No, I’m not really here to whine about top level domain names, but I am going to rant nonetheless. And this rant has been a long time coming, so sit back (or run away).

This whole industry is sick – and I mean the whole thing – broken. I hate this.

I hate that being a web designer means you have to belt out the same tired “San Francisco startup” website, or the “Cupertino frosted glass flat UI” look. I hate that if you try to stray from these two designs, some turtlenecked UX team lead will throw your portfolio in the trash.

I hate that being a backend developer requires you to learn some unproven language that got invented last month so the CTO can impress people in his mentor circle. I hate that the industry, after all these years, is still focused primarily on esoteric concepts like programming languages, as if syntax will make any measurable difference in your project’s outcome.

I hate that being a frontend developer has turned from an artform to a Bootstrap and Angular lovefest. I hate that I like Bootstrap and Angular.

I hate that startups have become wild idealist utopias for urbanites to pretend they’re making a difference while funding their caffeine addictions. I hate that I don’t want to live downtown simply because the fixie-obsessed fake people who live there make me feel dead inside.

I hate that being a designer means you have to put mustaches and birds all over everything dang thing. I hate that the art of design has been all but lost in the fits-all world of One Right Palette. One Right Framework. One Right Strategy.

I hate that we’re all visually screened in Skype interviews to make sure we wear an ample amount of man-scarves, facial hair, or nerd glasses. I hate that I somewhat fit this description.

I hate that we take orders from Chris Coyier, James Padolsey, and Jony Ive like they’re some kind of warlords that will lead us to a happy rainbow battle. I hate that your own ideas are garbage until they copy off you, at which point it becomes genius.

I hate that I build stuff nobody asked for, with no research to back up its purpose. I hate how it all gets thrown out in the end, with maybe a shred or two left to the Github wolves.

I hate that analysts play up the death of the desktop, while ignoring the soon-to-come trend of mobile burnout once the market hits saturation. I hate that this is all becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I hate the mobile-first ideology that is responsible for ugly, uninspired desktop experiences. I hate that these are being created and championed by people who call themselves user experience experts, who know how to create great responsive websites but choose to be lazy.

I hate that every website wants to present me with some kind of dizzying parallaxed nightmare because there’s a jQuery plugin on one of Smashing’s top 10 lists that makes it easy. I hate that I wrote one of those plugins.

I hate that designers are forgetting the art of good design and selling out to the marketing science and tech whimsy. I hate how every self-proclaimed internet ninja fancies themselves social marketing experts.

I hate that when ideas are born in the industry, the first question is, “how much could I beg for this on Kickstarter before Google buys me?” I hate how I can’t remember the punctuation rules for that last sentence.

I hate that Big Data is driving every new management decision. I hate how nobody really knows what Big Data is.

I hate SCRUM worship. I hate lean worship. I hate the worship of one-size-fits-all ideas.

I hate how we’ve gotten caught up in this gold rush of “the next big thing.” I hate how the tech media is trying to invent the need for wearables and the internet of things.

I hate all this interdependence on random cloud APIs. I hate how these APIs keep getting rewritten or disappear altogether.

I hate that I have to delete my voicemails without even listening to them, due to sheer magnitude of job recruiters contacting me even though I removed my resume listings months ago (because Career Builder sucks). I hate how, 5 years from now, I’m going to look back at that statement and shake my head.

I hate how I’m expected to move to The Valley if I want to be someone in the industry. I hate how, in the age of the Internet, this somehow matters.

I hate that I’ve had this iPad for over a year and can’t figure out what to do with it besides watch Cookie Monster sing Tom Waits songs. I hate that I faced an epic inner conflict about whether or not to target=”_blank” that link.

I hate how nobody really knows what I do. I hate how my industry job title has changed four times, but I’m still doing the exact same job.

I hate how “innovation” doesn’t stand for anything anymore. I hate how it has been reduced to another corporate buzzword, or to describe peanut butter flavored Pop-Tarts.

I hate the fakeness. I hate the pointlessness.

I hate that I wrote this, and I hate that you had to read it.

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