Category: Tech

Web by Joe WilcoxOct 1, 20174:06 pm

You Can Call Me a Flickr Fool

Blame inertia, or stupidity. On Dec. 29, 2016, I boasted: “I am abandoning Yahoo and its photo-sharing site, for many of the reasons stated seven months ago. My Flickr Pro account expires in September, and I will cancel a few weeks earlier to prevent auto-renewal. In the meantime, I consider my Flickr officially closed, and I will no longer use it”. Ah, yeah, that didn’t happen.

In preparation for my Flickr finale, back in July, I blocked the service from using my PayPal to auto-renew. Twenty-four days ago, I unsurprisingly received email that payment processing failed. Second-thoughts overwhelmed. While Yahoo is a mess, Verizon has since taken ownership—and my family now uses Red’s cellular service. There’s synergy there. Besides, my low-cost renewal remained in place: $44.95 for another two years. The standard service fee is $5.95 per month, or $49.95 yearly. Smitten with angst, I paid up.

Google by Joe WilcoxSep 30, 20174:23 pm

I Got to Giggle About Gaggles

Sometimes I can only laugh at the strangeness of Internet domain trading and squatting. In August 2015, I registered, for two years, the dot net, org, and xyz extensions for gaggles. The com was taken. I grabbed gaggles to create an email address for people to contact me to support my then-in-progress exposé about Google. With the sound geese make in mind, I sniped at the search entity’s new parent company and alphabet.xyz domain.

Last month, I let all three expire. I own too many domains that are too costly to keep for the value they give: None. Had gaggles.com been mine, though, I would hold them all. More renewals are passing by, or have gone. Meanwhile, I got to giggle about gaggles, because someone else snatched up the dot net and would like me to buy it back. Eh, seriously?

Photo by Joe WilcoxSep 29, 20176:20 am

The Cats of University Heights: Charlie, Too

On Sept. 27, 2017, for the second evening in a row, I observed a lean, orange furball in a yard on Campus Ave. between Meade and Monroe. Our first meeting was at 7:04 p.m. PDT—or nearly 30 minutes after sunset—when iPhone 7 Plus proved ineffective producing anything less than photos so overly-noisy that they could stand-in for bad impressionist painting knock-offs. Eh, no, to your question about there being some cool, new iOS 11 camera filter at work. Oh I wish!

The next sighting was earlier, 6:51 p.m. PDT for the Featured Image, but captured with the esteemed Leica Q about 14 minutes after sunset. Once again, the 28mm f/1.7 Summilux lens and 24-megapixel full-frame sensor delivered magnificently. This first pic is all about bokeh and narrow depth of field that draws the eye to the kitty’s face and head, which detail is super sharp. Vitals, aperture manually set: f/1.7, ISO 500, 1/60 sec, 28mm. That’s my wife petting him, BTW.

Living by Joe WilcoxSep 24, 20179:23 am

Home Buying Lessons from the Schoolhouse

Aug. 18, 2017. I travel back to San Diego after visiting my niece in Long Beach. Meanwhile, two blocks from our apartment, my wife attends an Open House for a cute, Spanish-style property listed for $586,000. Anne tells the seller’s real estate agent that we can’t afford to buy the place—an effective diversionary tactic. But the 900-square-footer is within our means, and we will nearly come to own it.

This is my story of wanting and walking away. I take with me disheartening lessons about the home real estate market.

Photo by Joe WilcoxSep 23, 20179:42 pm

Brownout!

They say timing is everything—good for comedy, bad for anything else. Yesterday, 10 minutes into recording a scheduled 2 p.m. PDT podcast, where I was the guest, the tone of palm tree-cutting/pruning outside changed from steadily annoying roaring to pitching alarming grinding. Simultaneously, and in near-perfect rhythm, the lamp light by my desk started flickering. “Uh-oh”, I thought. “Somebody nicked a power cable”.

Skype skidded to a stop, as the electrical disruption reset the AT&T U-verse modem, which could no longer get enough juice to function. The lamp stayed on but dimly. Major appliances, the refrigerator being principal among them, went off. Out on the street, overly-excited neighbors blabbered so loudly that their combined voices matched the decibel range of the now silenced tree cutter. I had already worried that the sawing would become unwanted ambient background noise on the recording. Ugh, now this.

Photo by Joe WilcoxSep 17, 201711:07 pm

Work in Progress

Here in University Heights, at the corner of Cleveland and Meade Avenues, is American Market. Next month, the Wilcox family celebrates 10 years living in the neighborhood, and the one-stop shop has been a fixture […]

Apple by Joe WilcoxSep 9, 201712:30 pm

Yikes! My Apple Watch Called 911!

How embarrassing is this? Few hours ago, I exercised with my wife—and I was in pushup position, which brought the top of my hand in frequent, forceful contact with Apple Watch crown and button. Suddenly, […]

Photo by Joe WilcoxSep 8, 20176:24 am

The Cats of University Heights: Anthony

Meet the third furball seen on Sept. 5, 2017, along the same Alabama block, between Adams and Madison. While Itchy Valentino hid under a car, Goldie howled at the tuxedo, who is ninth of that color-combo featured in this series, since its start 11 months ago.

The others: Bandit, Fraidy, Patience, Pepe, Poser, Sammy, Spot, and Tux. I shot the Featured Image—and its companion—using Leica Q at 8:40 a.m. PDT. Vitals are identical for each, aperture manually set: f/5.6, ISO 100, 1/125 sec, 28mm. Both are crops, but neither is retouched.

Photo by Joe WilcoxSep 7, 20178:37 pm

War and Peace

With nuclear holocaust threatening to spill out of North Korea into Asia, or even America, I can’t resist dusting off this previously unpublished photo from April 9, 2017. Vitals: f/2, ISO 200, 1/70 sec, 23mm; […]

Photo by Joe WilcoxSep 7, 20176:01 am

The Cats of University Heights: Goldie

The sudden, and unexpected, recent discovery of new neighborhood felines (five in two days), makes this site look like a cat blog, which it most certainly isn’t. I met three on Alabama Street, day-before-yesterday. Goldie is second of the trio.

The kitty approached, strutting behind Itchy Valentino, as I walked from Adams towards Madison. I shot the Featured Image, using Leica Q, on Sept. 5, 2017, at 8:48 a.m. Soon afterwards, a mom walking kids to school passed by. One of them knew the kitty’s name, which she said, and I later forget—embarrassingly. Yesterday, I walked back, luckily finding Goldie lounging on the sidewalk; name is on his collar.

Photo by Joe WilcoxSep 1, 20176:00 am

‘Come Home, Fess’

One month ago, Aug. 1, 2017, for the second consecutive evening, I saw my favorite neighborhood feline, Fess, lounging long after his owners came home for the day. The feisty, friendly furball sprawled far onto the sidewalk as it sloped into the street. I looked at my watch, 7:25 p.m. PDT, and walked down Cleveland Ave. to the corner of Meade—then turned back. I worried that in the dusk, a vehicular driver might not see the animal when turning into or backing out of the driveway. He looked relaxed and content. I walked on.

Four mornings later, as my mother lay dying in a Vermont medical center, I left our apartment for a long, soul-searching walk. Losing mom was unthinkable, but, based on communication with my sister Nanette, inevitable. Approaching the corner where I had looked back at Fess, his image waved from a poster placed on a utility pole by his human family. No one had seen the cat since the night of August 1st. He had vanished! My muscles tensed. We couldn’t lose Fess, too.

Mobility by Joe WilcoxAug 23, 20172:20 pm

Seriously, Verizon?

I should have known better. Once burned is supposed to be twice as wary. Right? Disgruntled by pricing and other policies, in autumn 2015, I took my family from Verizon Wireless to T-Mobile, which cut our monthly bill by more than one-third. But in May of this year we made the trek back in part because data speed is so much faster from my apartment than it is with Magenta. Better Red than dead, eh? Wrong. Oh, dumbass me. Un-carrier’s aggressive pricing, and Verizon’s first-ever quarterly loss of post-paid subscribers, compelled the nation’s largest carrier to respond—by, starting in February, to offer comparable unlimited plan that for my family of five lines would cost just $20 more a month while delivering superior, speedy service. But what Red gave, it now takes away. I regret the decision.

Today’s unlimited cellular service plan changes suck some of the most important value from all that extra bandwidth. What good is having something you can’t use? Henceforth, Verizon will offer two consumer options—one (Go Unlimited) that throttles streaming video to 480p on smartphones and costlier option Beyond Unlimited that reduces quality to 720p. Go is essentially priced the same as the older unlimited plan, and it takes away even more: Tethering (e.g. Mobile Hotspot) is capped at 600kbps. There’s no 4G LTE for you, baby!