Hoping for a Miracle

Most everyone has heard about the tragic story of the Titan sub trying to bring tourists down to see the Titanic. I spent Monday morning this week working on my sailboat's outboard engine. On the drive home, I heard a quick news blurb on the radio and became interested in the story. The sub went missing on Sunday and everyone knew they had 96 hours of air before the crew would start suffocating. I sincerely hoped the rescuers would find everyone alive and well within that 96-hour window.

Looking back, I had that nagging feeling that the sub imploded on the way down and nobody survived. I pushed that idea out of my mind as did a lot of people. The US Navy reported hearing an implosion sound on Sunday morning at about the same time the sub lost communication with the surface ship. They then clarified their statement as inconclusive. They knew what happened but didn't want to discourage anyone from looking for survivors because we all wanted to believe the 5 people in the sub could still be alive.

Tuesday and Wednesday we hear a story from searchers saying they heard banging sounds every 30 minutes. This is something that would happen if the people were sitting on the floor of the ocean inside the Titan sub tangled in the Titanic wreck. While we don't know the source of the sound, it gave everyone hope. We all wanted to believe in a miracle.

Thursday afternoon, the US Coast Guard held a press conference letting everyone know they had found pieces of the Titan sub on the floor of the ocean. They mentioned they found Titan's tail cone. I heard that but still had hope because it is a part meant to be ejected from the sub. Next they mentioned the rails that the sub sits on while on solid ground. Again, I had hope because the rails are not required to keep the hull of the sub intact. Finally they mentioned they found the front nose dome and all hope was lost that there would be any survivors. The only good news to come from the US Coast Guard press conference was closure to the story and knowing approximately what happened to the occupants inside the sub.

Today is Saturday and I have gone to a few news sources seeing if we know more about what happened. We can speculate but won't know for sure until a thorough analysis is completed. This will require finding as many pieces of the sub as possible, bringing them to the surface, and having engineers examine them to reconstruct what happened. I doubt it will be much different than what we all imagine happened as we mentally picture an aluminum can getting crushed with 5 people inside. I personally hope death came quickly and nobody suffered.

I know I am not alone as someone that hoped for a miracle. Everyone else that comments on the issue confesses to hoping as well. I think that is a good thing as we want to believe in happy endings. Sometimes it just doesn't work out that way.

Temu vs. Amazon

My wife recently bought me a linen suit. I had to host a company-wide event in New York and I wanted to look my best. The suit got a lot of complements and I enjoyed wearing it. I have continued wearing it as linen makes a great fabric for staying cool in summer.

While my new suit looks amazing, it can't change the fact that I am bald. Now I'm not saying baldness makes someone look better or worse, but you can't really wear a baseball cap with a linen suit. Not wearing a hat requires me to sunscreen my head or get a nasty sunburn. Sunscreen makes a bald head really shiny and so I prefer to wear a hat. What kind of hat goes well with a linen suit? A panama hat and my wife and I found one that we both like.

Initially we found the hat on Amazon for around $20. I thought about getting it but have been spending a lot of money on myself lately and so I opted to hold off. My wife was talking with some of her friends who have fallen in love with Temu and suggested she give it a try. She found the same hat on Temu for only $8. At that price she felt like she could get me an early Father's Day gift and gave it to me on Sunday. I wore it with my suit and looked like a villain from a James Bond film. Naturally I liked the combo.

This evening I started looking around to see what else is available on Temu. There are a lot of t-shirts with silly sayings but I wanted to see if they have more substantial items. I did a search for left-handed guitars and found a lot of musical items but no left-handed guitars. I doubt there are as many items as are available on Amazon but they have some great deals. From now on, I will probably search both sites and see which one has the better prices. So far Temu seems to be winning but we'll see how long that lasts.

Working From Home, Do I Need a Car?

My wife and I used to own 3 cars for the two of us. She drives a Jeep Wrangler, I have a truck that I mostly use in the winter and I used to have a sedan that I mostly drove in the summer months. Unfortunately the sedan started having mechanical problems and so I sold it. Then this last week, my truck has been in the shop with a warranty repair. It didn't need to be in the shop for a week but the extended warranty company wanted to make sure they didn't pay for unnecessary repairs.

I have to be honest, because I work from home, I hardly noticed my truck was gone. I don't really go anywhere and I am fine with that. I do need to exercise and so I go for a morning bike ride and get out of the house. Normally I try to keep that ride under an hour and end up going about 16 miles. Some people I know get a little stir crazy and need to get out of the house, which is part of the point of my daily ride.

Now my wife really missed my truck this week. She wanted to go to the hardware store and pick up garden supplies. Supplies that won't fit in the back of a 2-door Jeep. I got the truck back last night and my son informed me he needed to go pick up more supplies for finishing his basement. My wife interjected and said that he couldn't use it until she was done.

While I don't doubt we need the truck, I do question the necessity of owning 2 vehicles in the summer when I work from home. The cost of a second car is fairly significant considering annual licensing, insurance, gas, and maintenance not to mention the purchase price. That is one area where a lot of people could cut down on monthly expenses. 

Unfortunately that second car becomes very important during ski season as I try to get to the mountain every morning before work. I suppose I could convince my wife to come with me and that would eliminate the need for a second vehicle throughout the year. That didn't work this year though and I doubt it will next. Otherwise I think we really could not just survive but thrive with a single car. I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Phishing, Smishing, and Vishing

Every year Sony makes me take mandatory security training and I recently went through the exercise again. Whenever there is annual training, it is best to try and figure out what is new or has been changed. This year I learned two new terms: Smishing and Vishing.

I already know what Phishing is. Anyone who has had an e-mail account knows that scammers will try to send you an e-mail that plays on your emotions to get important personal information. Most of the time the e-mails are easy to spot and I quickly delete them.

The younger generations have mostly ignored e-mail and prefer phones. They fit in your pocket and so texting has become second nature to them. I used to hate texting as I saw it screw up a lot of meetings and slow things down. Now I don't mind it as it is an efficient way to communicate. This is what scammers use for Smishing, your mobile phone. It is the same thing as a Phishing attack but comes over your phone instead of through e-mail. Someone asking for the recently received code your bank texted to you would be an example of Smishing. The term is a mix of Phishing and SMS messaging. As with a Phishing attack, you should never share personal information via text messaging.

So what is Vishing? That is when a scammer calls you or uses voicemail to request sensitive information like passwords or bank information. With current artificial intelligence technology, scammers could call using your spouse or child's voice asking for a password. Therefore it is important to verify phone numbers whenever anyone asks for sensitive information. Even better would be to call the person back as phone numbers can be spoofed as well. Perhaps this is why there is a new word for something I have always considered Phishing until now.

There are relatively few scammers in the world but it feels like they are everywhere. This means we all need to be vigilant about not sharing secret information that would allow them to get into our bank accounts or steal our identity. Vocabulary for Phishing, Smishing, and Vishing just means that they are using every tool possible.

A Virus on my Mac Computer

My daughter just headed to Alaska for the summer to be a kayak guide. My wife and I would like to go up and visit so we started planning a trip. Unfortunately rental cars are really expensive in Alaska and so I started shopping around to some of the more inexpensive agencies. I got an e-mail from Dollar Rental Car and so I decided to check them out. Unfortunately when I tried to go to the site, it said my computer had a virus and wouldn't let me in.

Whenever I see a virus warning in my browser, I don't pay it much mind as it is very difficult for a website to scan your computer that quickly and determine you have a virus. More than likely there is a setting in your browser that it doesn't like and throws up a message indicating you could have a virus. It is better to be safe so I did a bit of checking.

The first thing I did was go to Dollar's website on another computer. I did not receive the offending message and so I knew it was not their website giving a blanket message. Next I tried another browser on my Mac. I have Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. Normally I use Firefox and so I tried Chrome. That worked fine and my guess is that I have a setting in Firefox that Dollar doesn't like.

Next I looked into finding some antivirus software for the Mac. This is where things get tricky. Doing a search can often lead you to false solutions that actually install malware or a virus on your computer. I went to a reputable source to see what the best antivirus software is. There are a number to choose from and some are better than others. I ran through several reviews and found a free one that I trust. The downside of free is that you are always being prompted to upgrade to the paid version. I'm willing to live with that for now. The free versions also don't have all of the features in the paid ones and so if you need something more than bare-bones functionality, you may need to shell out a bit of money.

I suppose it is better to be overly cautious and report potential problems instead of ignoring real ones. It has discouraged me from renting a car from Dollar because I cannot trust their website. Fortunately they are no cheaper than some of the larger brand rental car companies. Ultimately I will probably end up using Turo anyways as they have the best deals for rental cars in Alaska.

Carnage and Destruction

Last week I tried to ski every morning before work only to have my plans thwarted by avalanche danger. The huge snowfall coupled with rapidly warming temperatures created an unsafe environment for driving the canyon between the Salt Lake valley and the ski areas up Little Cottonwood Canyon, Snowbird and Alta. For the first 3 days, I could go to a safe area closer to home and tour to Alien Tower at the top of Suncrest in Draper. Then the warming temperatures melted a lot of snow and I decided it was no longer worth it. I waited patiently and was rewarded on Saturday morning with a safe window where the canyon opened enough to drive to Alta. Then I had to wait until the sun went down for them to open it again. It meant hanging out at Alta until after 7pm even though the lifts stopped running at 4:30.

As the canyon is closed again this morning and probably won't open until Saturday, I used my early morning time to create a video of Saturday's drive up to Alta where I filmed about 80% of the trip. In the video you can see most of the avalanches that crossed the road during the previous week. I missed the first one which is when I decided that I should probably pull out my phone and capture video as others might be interested in the carnage and destruction.

What is it about carnage and destruction that attracts viewers to video sites like YouTube? I get a lot of views of my skiing videos but this one will probably turn out to be one of my most popular. Should someone ask how to get a bazillion views of their video, I would recommend including natural disasters or other train-wreck ideas. People just can't help but watch.

Effective Use of my Smartphone

I often find myself in certain ruts where I don't try anything new and keep doing things the way they have been done for awhile. Then something will happen that challenges the old way and makes me look for improvement in everyday things. One such recent improvement came from the question of how effectively I am using my smartphone.

Every morning in the winter, I wake up and get ready to go skiing. I drive the 14 miles to Snowbird and ski for an hour before work. When anyone asks, this is my "gym time." That means I am using my ski boots daily and they need help drying out. I have a set of boot dryers that I use and only want them to run for a limited amount of time. I used to turn them on while I got ready for the day but decided I could use the timer on my smartphone. It is set for 50 minutes. When it goes off, I turn off the boot dryers. It is a little thing but started my mental wheels turning about how to use my smartphone more effectively.

Smartphones come loaded with a number of productivity applications and so there is no need to load up any more. Are you using those you have to their fullest potential? This morning my wife is busily working and sent me a quick text even though she is in the room above me. This is much more efficient than yelling through the house and trying to have "the original" long-distance communication.

One app I do have loaded onto my phone that I use constantly is a dictionary. I'm a pretty smart guy and figure I know the meaning to most of the words I hear in English. The reality is that there are a small number of words that I guess at the meaning based on context. Recognizing this, I have started looking up the meaning for words I am not absolutely sure of. This is tough to do in conversations but easy to do when I am reading something. Often times I will look up a word and remember something I heard from someone else and look that up too. I wouldn't say that my vocabulary is exploding, but I am finding I understand a lot more about what is being said.

Unfortunately there are a number of smartphone apps that can hinder you. I purposely don't have any social media loaded on my phone. I find it can be a distraction and keep me from actually being productive. I also don't have a lot of games on my mobile device. While they can help pass the time when you are stuck in line or waiting for an event to start, they more often keep one from doing more important things.

Using your smartphone effectively is a combination of taking advantage of its features as well as not letting it become a distraction. If you have any suggestions on what works for you, I'd be interested in your comments.