Today, I woke up in my flame-retardant bed, and took a shower with treated water that probably won’t give me legionnaire’s disease. The air outside is clean because the factories across the river have to meet EPA standards. I get in a car and proceed to perform the incredibly dangerous act of driving, but I’ll probably survive; My car is tagged, titled, licensed, insured, equipped with dozens of safety features, and passes government efficiency requirements (it’s not a VW). I listen to an FCC-regulated radio that is required to alert me if there is a natural disaster looming, and probably won’t give me brain cancer. I pass under bridges, jets, and cranes that probably won’t fall on me because they go through mandatory inspections. While I’m away from home, it probably won’t collapse since it was built and wired to national, state, and local engineering codes. Everyone at work has been vaccinated so I probably won’t get a life-threatening illness. I probably won’t get hurt on the job because of OSHA laws. I use a computer that probably won’t burst into flames because it is UL listed. I eat lunch at a place that has been inspected by the county so it probably isn’t rat infested, and the food I eat meets FDA standards, so it probably won’t give me salmonella. I get my paycheck on time because the state requires it. After work, I go to a movie, but despite the 1st Amendment, people can’t yell “FIRE!” in the crowded theater without probably facing criminal charges.

Now imagine a deranged man bursts into this dark theater, locks the doors, and kills most of us. He bought his guns the same day, easily and legally, without any sort of regulation that should have kept him from doing so. This is the reality of living in the United States. And you know what? I’m tired of ignoring the elephant in the room.

The point I’m getting at is twofold: First, laws and regulations are necessary and save lives. The point of living under a government is to promote the general welfare, as long as it is constitutionally legal. Second, in a free country we don’t ban/outlaw things, because that is almost always the wrong approach. When cars were invented and killed lots of people, we didn’t give up and ban them; we put a massive amount of regulations on them and every single year since, the death rate has dropped. Almost nobody is trying to cheat the system and buy “black market cars” and fake licenses. At the same time, nobody looked at at all the car deaths 100 years ago and thought, “whelp, cars are dangerous in the wrong hands and people are just gonna keep dying. Traffic lights won’t work, people will run them anyway. Let’s just have the wild west out on the streets because freedom.”

This is why Americans are sick of near zero regulation of firearms. The vast majority of people don’t want to take your guns away. They don’t want to repeal the 2nd Amendment. They WANT you to keep your guns, protect yourself, and enjoy them as long as you’re sane and responsible (and nearly all gun owners are). They just want the same common sense gun laws nearly every other country in the world has, because they work. Not 100% of the time of course, but they make a difference and save lives.

Additional thoughts on the US gun murder epidemic

1) More or fewer guns is not a solution. There are no reliable stats that suggest the quantity of guns will change the murder rate. Show me one that says one thing, and I’ll show you one that says the opposite.
2) Banning gun-free zones is a bad idea. Just like you might have concerns with someone coming into your house with a gun, a private establishment should have the right to make their own decisions. However, these establishments should be subject to lawsuits if they make no attempt to provide ample security while being gun-free.
3) I don’t think anyone is making the argument to “ban” all guns. That’s impossible and unconstitutional anyway. But I do think that every state should be able to decide what constitutes a well-regulated militia to the extent “necessary to the security of a free State.”
4) Like driving, you should need to pass tests and get a license to own guns. It should be more difficult than walking into a gun show. To me, this is a bare minimum definition of a well-regulated militia. If you haven’t proven your ability to safely own and use a firearm, I don’t think the Constitution is talking about you.
5) Like driving, you should need to carry liability insurance for every gun you own. This will require a third party to analyze each person’s risk factors (illness, medications, history, location, etc.), and they would be incentivized not to insure high-risk individuals and certain firearm configurations. A gun would not be purchasable or transferable without proof of said insurance. Uninsured gun = fines. Insured gun stolen = fines. Insured gun used in crime = fines for insurance company and payout to those affected.
6) Keeping guns from getting stolen or used by children is your responsibility, and an extremely important one. Put a GPS tracker in your gun safe. Some states could have laws requiring this.
7) “Stuff happens” is not a helpful solution. Of course murder will keep happening with or without gun laws, just like drunk driving will happen with or without DUI laws. The point is there are actions we can take to help prevent gun murder and make guns much more difficult to obtain for those that shouldn’t have them.
8) We need to come to serious terms with the mental health issues in this country and what is causing them. I have a feeling the answers are all things none of us want to hear, and that’s why we aren’t asking the questions.

.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.

Let’s get real for a few minutes.

Believe it or not, PCs serve an important purpose: to get important stuff done. Think of it like semis vs. cars. One one end, you have something that gets you from A to B. On the other end, you have a hulking machine built to haul 10 tons or more. They’re huge, ugly, and burn energy, but they do what a car simply won’t do in its form factor. As much as I would love to have a PC that fit in my pocket, the reality is this won’t be happening for a very long time.

I built my desktop to be a stuff-doing station. It has 16GB of RAM, an 8-core 64-bit processor, a video card that cost an embarrassing amount of money, and banks upon banks of peripherals. Shrinking down this computer anytime soon would be impossible. I mean, the video card alone is probably the size of around 15 iPhones. Multi-terabyte drives are the size of 3 iPhones. Running on ARM could probably shrink down the other internals, but we’ve already got a huge problem for real-world work if we can’t manage to shrink down storage and video cards at a decent price.

What do we need that stuff for? Well, let’s look at the PC audience. Gamers, they need those video cards, maybe even 2 or 3 of them. Video editors, they’ll need a good video card as well, plus RAM and serious HDD space, not to mention speed. 3D artists will need a rendering farm (the cloud won’t do), specialty video cards, and loads of RAM. Graphic designers mostly need adequate screens, but they also need adequate processing and human interfaces. Businesses simply need adequate interfaces and access to Office. Engineers and scientists also need adequate interface and processing power. Desktop computers are massive, hot, and loud, because, well, they’re doing some pretty hardcore stuff. The wonderful thing about the mobile revolution is we no longer need to use them for basic tasks like web surfing and social media, but there are people in this world that need them to do their jobs.

So where do I see things in a few years? I think we’ll still see both devices, and I think we’ll finally see real docking stations, but I don’t think we’ll see actual tablets or smartphones being used as PC replacements. This might possibly work in the business world (and it would be kinda cool and probably seal the deal for BYOD), but smartphones still have a ways to go before you can use them for other purposes. Eventually things will miniaturize, but who knows if they’ll catch up to the raw power, customization, and upgradability of a desktop. We really need a way to dock our devices together in a synergistic (I hate that word, sorry) fashion to share data efficiently, but it seems like a lesson in futility at this point to try and replace the desktop completely, especially if your peripherals will be taking up lots of space anyway. I mean, a tablet won’t be replacing your mouse and keyboard in production (if you disagree, you’ve never designed or developed anything in your life). A tablet won’t replace your dual monitor setup, or your RAID, your subwoofer, etc. so what’s the big deal about having a box to better process your serious work? Desktops aren’t just a box, they’re a human interface and peripheral setup that has stayed consistent for decades for good reason.

So I touched on modularity being absent on smartphones, so let’s talk about the recent social media interest in the Phoneblok concept. I think we’ve all had this idea at some point in time, and it really is a great idea. Obviously there are some engineering challenges with what they portray, but that’s not to say it’s impossible to do. If good ideas were easy to engineer, we’d run out of good ideas. That said, some of this concept is pretty silly. Some thoughts of mine.

– There’s no shame in merging similar functionality. Wifi, Bluetooth, and NFC should probably be merged into one block. I mean seriously, when was the last time your Bluetooth broke on your phone? Heck, when was the last time you used Bluetooth?
– The block and pin idea would probably be flaky. They should have gone a different direction, like PCI card slots… rails and a pinout on the end. This would make engineering much simpler and avoid having the phone burst into 10 pieces if you drop it.
– Simplify. Instead of trying to modularize everything, just have slots for where things will go. Have everything held together by a battery on top, then have 1 CPU slot, 1 big card slot, and 4 small slots. That way you don’t have to tear your hair out second-guessing the user’s configuration. A battery and a CPU have no hardware interface commonalities.
– Don’t pretend this is greener. In all honesty, the Phonebloks idea might actually increase waste, and it will certainly up the manufacturing costs.
– In the real world, most of these things are crammed into a single board or chip. This is how they are able to make the devices so cheap and fast. Separating everything out means a headache for the manufacturers of these chips, and the engineers that have to deal with the interfacing.

I’m willing to bet someone will eventually try to tackle this problem, but it won’t be something from Kickstarter. Just my two cents.

After every Apple keynote, you can always expect to read the same type of sensationalist article. You know, the “Is this the end of _______ as we know it?” Well, iPads didn’t kill PCs, Siri didn’t kill Google search, and thumbprint scanners will NOT kill passwords.

See, biometrics aren’t really in the same vein as passwords; they’re really more of a supplement, or a verification of a person’s prescence, like a PIN number or SMART card. They’re not trying to be passwords, they’re something else entirely. They’re just trying to make life difficult enough for people who aren’t you, or at least difficult enough without a specialized computer. Even a 6 digit PIN only has 1,000,000 combinations, which would take a computer seconds to brute force, but that’s beside the point.

The point I’m going to make is that biometrics have similar flaws that don’t make it suitable as a password replacement. In all fairness, replacing a PIN number is really all Apple is trying to accomplish at this point, and I think that’s great, so it’s the media that has it all wrong.

So what’s wrong with thumbprints compared to passwords? Just off the top of my head…

• Thumbprints cannot be changed, revoked, or reset. If someone knows your thumbprint hash, you’re out of luck, forever. If you are concerned about the NSA, this should terrify you.
• You are limited to 10 thumbprints. And even then, you’re not going to remember which finger you used for what website.
• They technically aren’t replacing a password, A thumbprint is read as a hash and stored as a shadow password. It will especially work this way for websites.
• The thumbprint reader and software introduces failure points. A hacker could take control of these systems and force a certain hash without scanning a thumb. A man in the middle could read the hardware interaction and simulate it later.
• Thumbprints aren’t secret. You leave traces of your fingerprints on everything. Especially mobile devices.
• Technology exists to “lift”, analyze, and reproduce said fingerprints, and it will only improve with demand.
• Some people have stubborn fingerprints. Me, for instance. When I worked for the University, we went through several thumb and handprint timeclocks the professors had to use. Those machines hated me. One of them would routinely make me scan 8-10 times before it would get a match, while it worked fine for everyone else. I think it had to do with my hands always sweating.
• They add a failure point for the device. As someone who has owned several scanners through the years… these things break. On a PC it’s not a big deal, you can run out any buy the same brand thumbprint scanner, but what happens when it breaks on your iPhone? You buy a new phone, and you don’t get your data back.
• You can’t let a trusted party use your thumbprint when you’re away.
• You can damage your thumbprint. What if you burn your thumb while cooking dinner? You could be locked out of your computer for weeks, or in some cases, permanently.
• There hasn’t been much study on this, but thumbprints could be prone to hash collisions, especially if you are forced to scan a “backup finger”. Different biometric technologies, or course, will vary greatly.
• Your actual thumb could get stolen. Don’t laugh, it has happened. Some thieves are willing to cut off your thumb if it will give them complete, unrevokable access to your entire life.
• Biometric hardware does not give standard readings, so you’re at the mercy of a third party to maintain access to your accounts. If you replace one piece of hardware with another brand, it will probably not give the right hash.

Passwords, of course, have problems of their own, but they are still the most secure and sensible way to protect your data. Even something easy to remember like “iLikeBag3lsAndCr3amcheese_” is incredibly secure for years to come. The thing is, security is up to you. Your password should be long. It should have caps, numbers, and special characters. You should not use the same password twice. It should not be obvious, and you should not write it down. Follow these rules and you have very little to worry about, besides forgetting it.

What’s the right way to go about authentication? I dunno, I’m not a security expert. I would say multi-factor authentication is always best, so maybe a password-protected SMART cart would be the best way.