Anecdotal vs. Statistical Evidence

This morning I went out for my usual morning bicycle ride. I love being out on my bike as it reminds me of the freedom I felt as a kid. Unfortunately not everyone shares in my excitement and I had a number of cars get way to close for comfort. I'm not sure how long I will be able to keep up the daily rides. Getting run off the road by inattentive drivers is never fun and has a tendency to shorten one's lifespan.

Utah law states that drivers cannot be any closer than 3 feet to cyclists on the street. Furthermore cyclists with wheels of a certain size are not allowed on sidewalks and are required to ride in the road. You'd be amazed at how many times I have had motorists tell me to ride on the sidewalk. Unfortunately it is illegal.

Today I had 3 different motorists see how close they could get to me on my bike. When I can feel the car with my elbow hairs, I think it is well inside that 3-foot limit cars are supposed to provide. Here is where statistics come to play in the story: Every single one of the cars that got too close had a University of Utah license plate. Ask me how I feel about the University of Utah right now.

Fortunately I spend my days working with data and know the difference between anecdotal and statistical evidence. Not everyone from the University of Utah is out to kill cyclists or scare the pants off them. The very small sample size of today's clueless drivers just happens to pull from a lot of University of Utah fans. I'm sure if I had been riding my bicycle a little further to the south and nearer to Brigham Young University, the license plates could easily have promoted that school.

The important thing to remember is that you experience with an easily identifiable group of people does not represent everyone in that group. Nowadays it is much too easy to apply labels and exclude large groups of people because of an unsavory experience with only a few members of that group. Knowing that doesn't make it easy to forgive them though. 

Why Kids Seem Technologically Gifted

Last week I had the pleasure of spending an entire week with my soon-to-be 5-year-old granddaughter at Disney World. When any of my grandkids turn 5, my wife and I take them to Disney with just the two of us. No parents. No siblings. She is the 4th to have such a trip and we had a wonderful time.

As my granddaughter lives in Ohio, I had to get on a plane, fly out to Ohio, pick her up, and fly to Orlando where we met my wife. In case you are interested, the whole trip involved 8 flights for me and 4 for my granddaughter. My wife had an easy trip with non-stops between Salt Lake and Orlando for a total of 2 flights. She gets the arduous journey the next time.

While doing all that flying, my granddaughter enlightened me with her technical skills. She is only 4 but will be 5 in September. Our first flight together started on tiny regional jet known as a CRJ. It didn't have any screens to keep us entertained and so I pulled out my Kindle Fire, connected to the plane's WiFi, logged into Netflix as a "Kid," and gave it to my co-traveler. I assumed she would watch one of the cartoons I started for her. It didn't take long for her to grow tired of the show I picked out and she told me she wanted to watch "Alphabet." I had no idea what that meant. Several minutes later I leaned over and saw that she had stopped the cartoon and started watching "Wicked for Good." It hit me that Alphabet is how she remembered the Elphaba character from the popular musical.

I didn't have to show my granddaughter how to change videos nor how to find what she wanted to watch. She had no problem stumbling around Netflix's UI and finding what she wanted to watch. Later I saw her rewinding the video for favorite songs or fast forwarding over scary parts.

After watching my granddaughter I realized that she has no problem jumping into new technology and figuring out how to use it. She builds on past experiences and if she doesn't know how to do something, she just tries it. I compared that to how I look at new things and feel like I don't want to make mistakes and am much more afraid to try something. Little kids don't worry about it. If something goes wrong, they hand the screen back to an adult and say, "It broke," leaving you to solve the problem they created.

While I cannot adopt the attitude that someone else will always be there to fix my mistakes, I can show a little more courage and not be afraid to just try stuff. This is especially true on a streaming platform. There is very little you can do to dig yourself into a hole. About the worst thing you can do is log yourself out of the service and Netflix makes that nearly impossible. I really had to go searching around for that when it came time to check out of our accommodations. Borrowing from my granddaughter's fearlessness of just trying things, I figured it out and now guests visiting my condo in Orlando can't log in as me.

What TV Resolution do you Need?

I want to begin by saying that I love my 85-inch 4K Sony television. The picture is amazing and the screen is huge. Being a Sony employee I get discounts on our electronic products and so I didn't have to pay full price. Before that I had a 60-inch 1080p Sony television that had the added benefit of being passive 3D. That is the same technology used in movie theaters so when I wanted more glasses, I could just bring the ones from the movie theater home with me. So the question is if I notice a difference and if I think an 8K television would be better.

First I have to say that I like the larger screen but that is not what I want to focus on today. I have a large theater room in my house and the 85-inches fits perfectly. The size of the television is constrained by where you will put it. If you are in a small apartment, 50-inches may be perfect. If you are sitting within a few feet of the screen, 85-inches is definitely too large.

Resolution is a different metric than size and refers to the number of pixels on the screen. Your standard television from 30 years ago had a resolution of 640x480. That is not very many pixels and it is tough to go back to those old displays now. The picture quality is not that great. Now try to go back and watch an old VHS video cassette. That resolution came in at 320x240 and is painful to watch now.

A 1080p screen means there are 1920x1080 pixels and became the gold standard for televisions about 10 years ago. We also moved from a 4x3 aspect ratio to 16x9 which created a wider screen but that is yet another metric we don't need to focus on. Let's stick with just the number of pixels on most screens.

I remember attending an internal Sony technology fair about 10 years ago and seeing the first 4K televisions. The pictures looked very lifelike and made great demos. I wondered how long it would take for content to become available as a 4K screen has as many pixels as 4 1080p ones. That means videos are that much larger and streaming services require that much more bandwidth to send them to you.

It didn't take long for content to arrive but did it really? Your common Blu-ray player is limited to 1080p. If you want to see anything in true 4K, you have to upgrade to the newer 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player found in the PlayStation 5. Now you can try to stream that high resolution but the reality is that you won't get true 4K content. A streaming service like Netflix requires you to have the the premium service and all of your devices have to support 4K. Then you have to have the right Internet connection. The truth is that you will rarely see 4K content from any streaming service provider. That doesn't mean it is impossible, just rare.

People use televisions for more than just watching things. I used to spend a lot of time gaming and higher resolution monitors provide an advantage. While some games don't support the higher resolution, some do and they look amazing. I also have a 4K television that I have connected to my Mac computer and I like having that much screen real estate. It allows a lot of open windows at the same time.

So what resolution do you really need? If all you are doing is watching television and movies, your 1080p is just fine. I would not go out and buy a new TV. Now if something happened to your old television and it is time to get a new one, I would definitely recommend one that is 4K. I had a TV go bad in my vacation condo that I rent out and I replaced it with a 4K one. Yes I had to spend a little more but it should last awhile.

If you are big into gaming or use your television as a computer monitor, I highly recommend 4K and wouldn't even look at a lower resolution. Furthermore I would make sure the minimum size of my computer monitor is 43 inches. Smaller than that and you have to sit too close to the screen for it to be comfortable. My wife has a 4K monitor connected to her laptop that is 32 inches and she has reduced the resolution as it is too small at true 4K.

Now some of you are probably wondering if you need an 8K TV. Currently Sony does not make one and so you have to look at other manufacturers. Because of that, I won't be buying one soon. Furthermore there is little to no content available for them. Remember that 8K is like having 4 4K TV's. That minimum 43-inch monitor explodes to 86 inches if you want to use it as a computer monitor. That won't even fit on my desk. My neck hurts just thinking about it.

Eventually I may change my mind. As bandwidth from Internet providers increases and content becomes available, the change may make sense. I just don't see it right now. Should I need a new TV any time soon, I'll stick with 4K for now.  

A Win at the Right Time

In my youth I read an article about people who always look for contests to enter. They end up winning a lot and so I have always tried to enter events when they come across my desk. For awhile they provided me hope during dark times. While I didn't really win much, I did win a gift or two including a Samsung tablet.

Every Thursday and Friday I get e-mails from an association where I am a member. The e-mails have a number of contests I can enter and prizes range from $100 gift cards to thousands of dollars in cash prizes. I have been doing this for about 6 years and never won anything until today. I read my e-mail this morning and discovered I won a $100 gift card for Uber and Uber Eats. When I first saw the card, I thought about burning it on a nice dinner when I know my wife or I don't want to cook. Then I remembered it isn't just for food but also for Uber rides.

Soon my wife and I will be headed to Orlando with our 5-year-old grand daughter. Due to my wife's busy schedule I will be flying to Ohio to pick up the little one and my wife will meet us there. My flight gets in before 6pm while my wife doesn't arrive until well after 11pm. I worried about having to wake up late at night, wake my grand daughter, and go to the airport. No 5 year old wants to disturb their sleep nor does any adult that will have to deal with the child the next day.

I gave my free gift card to my wife and had her add it to her Uber account. Now when she arrives at 11pm, she can summon an Uber and I can continue sleeping as can my precious grand daughter. This will work out very well.

Winning a contest is never a given. In fact I hardly ever win but I don't mind trying if the only thing it costs is time, which truthfully isn't free. While I will always have a use for an Uber gift card, this one came at the perfect time and I am thankful. 

Using AI to do my Paperwork

Two days ago I became involved in a work process that did not go as planned. As can happen in all software, a unique set of circumstances arose that kept a task from completing. Imagine running out of an ingredient when making cookies. You cannot finish the task until you go to the store and purchase what is missing. That is what happened at work.

We received an alert from our monitoring service and engineers started working on it immediately. Several service-desk tickets got created and eventually we solved the problem. Now we need to document what went wrong and the solution we used. My boss gave me the task to write up an "Incident Report." I did not want to spend hours going through the various documentation we created and so I used AI to create the report.

Our service desk software includes an AI tool that probably just links into Gemini or ChatGPT. I clicked on the link to get the AI help and provided a prompt. I told it to "Create an incident report based on the service tickets." The AI thought about it for a solid 2 minutes and then spit out a well-formatted incident report. I read through the information and thought it did a pretty good job. Most importantly I didn't have to do it. I copied the output to where I needed to put the report and headed off to dinner.

This morning I met with my boss and reviewed the incident report. He purposely didn't instruct me to use AI but hoped I would. When he asked how long it took to create the documentation, I told him 2 minutes and he appreciated that I didn't spend a long time to create the report. 

Why Can't Stuff Just Work?

This morning I received a work e-mail indicating that something is broken with a system over which I am responsible. I quickly went to work troubleshooting the issue. I used AI to help me comb through our system documentation and found a number of possible leads on how to solve the issue. I threw it out to the people reporting the problem only to discover our documentation is incorrect. I had to go back to square one.

I'm trying to solve the issue at work when I get a text from my wife who can't get the new toner cartridges to work at the office. That shouldn't really bother me as I'm not paid to help troubleshoot her office computer problems. Unfortunately we have the same printer at home and I just bought the same toner cartridges for ours. While I don't need them to work now, I will in the future. Furthermore today is the 31st day after I received them from Amazon which means I am past the 30-day return window.

Now two problems to solve in the same day shouldn't be a problem. Any mother with a 4-year old knows that is the first 10 minutes of every day. However I try to ensure all of my technologies stay working and don't break down. Discovering you need to print something important only to have new toner cartridges not recognized might lead to panic and expletives. Fortunately my wife discovered that problem early.

To address the issue at work, I gathered more information and looked at possible solutions. Then I made sure not to commit to anything on the behalf of others. If I can fix something, then I can commit. If the solution involves others, I can't speak for their time. This keeps others from committing my time. It looks like we will need to have network engineers involved in the solution and so I need to make my notes available and let others solve the problem.

For the printer, I exchanged a number of messages with my wife. She was unable to get her printer working but succeeded in returning her work toner cartridges to Amazon. So I gave them a call. I explained the process she went through and how I have the same printer and would rather return unopened product which might be resold to someone that can use them. The Amazon customer service agent looked up the details of my purchase and immediately agreed to allow me to return them for a full refund.

Now the only problem is that my printer is almost out of toner and I need to order replacement cartridges. HP makes my printer and they have gotten wise to Chinese manufacturers selling compatible toner for half the price. To combat it, they require a special chip in new cartridges and regularly update printer firmware to reject any toner than their own. If you want to ensure your printer will continue to work, you have to buy new cartridges from HP. Yes they are more expensive but at least they should work, right? I sure hope so cause it is really expensive.

Still Not Done With the New Phone

Yesterday I felt so good getting my new phone completely set up. Little did I know I had more to do. I discovered that today during a meeting. I tried to log into a secure system and it needed my multi-factor-authentication (MFA) token. While some of the services got configured with the data transfer, some of them did not and I didn't realize it.

I use Microsoft Authenticator for most of my MFA access. I also have RSA and Okta set up on my phone but have done a good job of focusing using a single tool. For some reason my work account has some level of extra security. Copying the data from my old phone didn't copy the necessary information for my work account. When I went to log into a secure data system this morning, I never received a message with the MFA token used to complete the login. All I could do in my meeting was explain I updated my phone and would have to get the necessary information after the call finished.

All I needed to do is log into Microsoft Authenticator. When it came time to receive the MFA token, I made sure to turn on the old phone first as it could receive the token or 2-digit number to use. After that little dance, I turned my old phone off again and have MFA tokens being sent to the new phone.

Not wanting to miss something else, I logged into my RSA and Okta apps on my new phone. Neither of them are set up at all. I will have to use my old phone to fix that for my new phone. Right now it is not an emergency and so I can wait a day or two. The trick is not waiting too long as I don't want to have to use the excuse that I updated my phone months ago and never got around to getting everything installed.