Tech
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Try doing a long-press on the QR code image and see if the popup menu shows you what the QR code is. . Sometimes that will work, but not always - how a long press is handled is up to the app displaying the code. (Looks like Safari will try to decode it for you, in which case you can skip all the steps below - but lots of other apps don’t.) (h/t to Tom for the reminder.)
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Take a screen shot in usual way (press side button and volume-up on a FaceID phone, for instance), then tap the thumbnail image that appears to bring up the photo editor.
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Tap the text-selection icon in the lower right (shown below in red.) If you don’t see that button, first tap the markup button in the top toolbar (shown in green.)
- Once you’ve tapped that text-selection button, all the text in the image becomes copyable - AND - you can tap on the image of the QR Code to see what it is, or to open it in Safari, or to copy the URL if you like.
- stop making its iconic black computers
- abandon work on a PowerPC-based workstation
- try selling its hardware business and factory to Canon
- focus on software
- rename the company "NeXT Software"
- lay off 300 of its 540 employees.
- there were no associates
Perhaps my final team meeting
I could never say enough good things about my work colleagues and friends. 32 years ago I had no idea that my dream job actually existed, but it turns out, it does, and it’s working with this gang. It was great seeing everyone in New York this week and I’m happy they could meet Photographer Cathy too!
Y’know, it’s one of the odd things from working at home, which I’ve done the whole time (albeit with a LOT of work travel.). You get so used to video chats via WebEx and Zoom that you almost forget what it’s like to see people in three dimensions, and eventually you realize that your wife has hardly ever actually met anybody you work with. I’m glad I had that chance this week.
I’ve never really been a fan of hugging people at work but I made a lot of exceptions to that policy this week. (Cathy did too, but she’s always like that.)
Thanks, team. You’re all the best.
ps. wait, what, am I retiring? Well, yeah. Soon.
A different story about Apple and NeXT
Reminiscing about my first Mac, which NeXT bought me. I guess Steve Jobs bought it for me.
Handling a QR Code on your iPhone
Pro Tip: Your iPhone can decode a QR code if you point the camera at it, that’s easy - but what if instead you are looking at a QR Code on the screen (in a web page, or your photo library, or one someone emailed to you) ? Here’s a quick way to deal with a QR code like that.
In this example I have used Safari to visit Wikipedia’s QR code page.
So how do we figure out what that QR Code is?
Easy peasy.
Young people, a tech tip for you. Listen up!
Save a piece of cool tech you use today, so you can show it off and bore people in 30 years with how tough you head it when YOU were getting started.
Apple + NeXT, 25 years ago today.
Remembering the merger of Apple and NeXT and how anxious we all were and how well it worked out. Also with a new baby.
Remembering NeXT's Black Monday. Or possibly Sunday.
NeXT's Black Monday
Today’s the 28th anniversary of the day in 1993 that NeXT decided to
and not insignificantly
Including me, Systems Engineer for NeXT Canada.
(Later on, of course, Apple purchased NeXT and its software became the core of iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS, all running on hardware that was inconceivable to any of us in 1993.)
or possibly Sunday
Looking back at my calendar I see that February 7, 1993 was actually a Sunday, so I might be off by one in my reminiscing. But still. It was kind of a big deal, personally.
vague reminiscences, previously tweeted
I remember we all got an urgent voice mail and the entire NeXT Canada office - all 3 of us - were instructed to fly to Chicago immediately for some news.
That was an interesting trip as Phil, Paul and myself debated exactly what was going on and who was going to be left standing. We knew that the regional manager was out.
And we all got let go, effective immediately, and - I still can’t believe we felt we needed to do this - we went to visit our big customers back in Toronto in person the following day to let them know what was going on.
You know those tables where they assign numerical values to various stress factors? Getting laid off was one thing but we had also (2) just bought a house and (3) were expecting child #1. I needed a bigger chart.
I remain, however, eternally grateful to Trimark Investment Management, one of our biggest NeXT customers, because when we visited them to tell them all of NeXT Canada had been let go, they said “Huh. That’s unfortunate …. Steve do you want to do some consulting for us?”
Thus began the historic short life of the consulting firm of Steve Hayman and Associates *
One thing I remember from the layoff meeting in Chicago, where somebody I had never met before told me I no longer had a job. “I want to keep my computer.”
— OK … what computer do you have?
(Changed the subject quickly. I think I actually had two computers.)
One other thing I remember. Consulting for Trimark, they had a fleet of NeXT computers, I had one at home, so I bought a portable SCSI hard drive to carry my work back and forth because how else were you supposed to do it in 1993
a ONE GIGABYTE SCSI hard drive. Massive! And it was only $1000!
Today for $1000, you’d get, what, 50 terabytes? 50,000 times as much? Storage is 1/50,000 th of what it was? How many other things are 50,000 times cheaper? That’s basically FREE now.
I know this will come as a surprise to nobody but Steve Hayman and Associates was not exactly a huge success. (I blame the associates, of course.)
18 months later, as NeXT pivoted to software, the regional team - from Michigan - came to Toronto to present to, I forget who exactly, some bank or something. They kindly invited the entire Steve Hayman and Associates team to attend.
Before the session started, the NeXT team said in a kind of off-hand way, “Hey Steve, how about you do the presentation?”
I guess in retrospect it was kind of an audition.
And, whaddya know, I guess NeXT saw (one of) the error(s) of its ways, and offered me a job again.
note: it is possible I am still telling the same jokes in presentations, because, you know, Object Oriented programming encourages re-use
So, miraculously, even though this day in February 1993 was a very stressful low point for me and hundreds of others, I was lucky enough to get drafted by NeXT a second time.
For a while, NeXT Canada was me in Toronto, and a guy in Vancouver (hi Scott.) We’d phone each other on Memorial Day, or July 4, or US Thanksgiving just to verify the other guy was actually in the office.
I still have a surprising quantity of NeXT business cards. I keep those with my SCSI cables. Hey, you never know.
Pi Day
It’s Pi Day. March 14. 14th day of the third month. And if - for some reason - you insist on writing the date as “3/14”, it kind of looks like π, except that 3/14 = 0.2142857….
We might all be better off celebrating Pi Approximation Day - July 22, which some would write as 22/7, which is 3.142857… That is much closer to the true value, which is, of course
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679....
I typed that from memory. Trust me.
So anyway, math lovers will temporarily put aside their advocacy for the one true ISO8601 style of writing the date, which is
DO NOT ARGUE WITH ME ON THIS
WRITE THE DATE THIS WAY
ALWAYS
2019-03-14
for one day, in the interests of the greater good of society. We will write the date wrong, just this once.
Sidebar: The 2000 version of the ISO8601 standard allowed for writing dates with "reduced accuracy", and allowed you to use the notation "--MM-DD" for a date without a year, so you COULD write "--03-14" and be within the standard. But for reasons I don't know, mainly because it costs money to download a copy of the standard, the 2004 version of ISO8601 apparently disallows writing the month without also writing the year.
Every –03-14 I always wind up thinking about Pi. I can’t help it. Everybody at work is sending me pi jokes and links to pi T-shirts and this is what happens when you make the mistake of standing up in a large team meeting 20 years ago and reciting Pi to 100 decimal places in order to make some point about Applescript programming; you are now “the pi guy” and every year, it never stops.
do you know a lot of random facts about pi?
yes
are they interesting to lots of other people?
no
are you going to write a blog post about them anyway?
eventually
ok just for now, why do you know π to 100 places?
well I memorized it to 200 places in grade 10, but I’m getting older.
why did you memorize it to 200 places in grade 10?
Because I thought it would impress girls
did it?
It took a while. Cathy married me several decades later. It was worth it.
New shirts for the Moon Shot 1969 50th Anniversary
fifty years ago
July 16, 1969. Mom and Dad took my brother and me to Florida to see the Apollo XI launch. I will be grateful to them forever for taking us to see the greatest scientific thing ever.
I took this picture with my Kodak Instamatic 100. It’s still my favourite picture I’ve ever taken. See that white dot above the two puffs of smoke? That’s Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins heading to the moon.
We watched this from what is now Parrish Park in Titusville, on the SR 402 causeway heading to the Kennedy Space Center. Dad rented a camper van and we patiently waited it out, along with a million other people…
and we checked out the same spot in 2015 (this time with a slightly better camera).
Oh, and we got souvenir shirts. Here we are, having just returned from Florida in this spacious camper van - me, Mom (who, sadly, didn’t get a shirt), Dad and my brother. 
Check out the cool shirts with a beautiful late 1960s aesthetic. “MOON SHOT 1969 - I was there.” They weren’t quite bold enough to put the actual launch date on the shirt. Just in case.
My sister was a baby at the time and didn’t come along, and I’m sure she has been very tired of hearing for almost 50 years of what an amazing thing this was. And she didn’t get a shirt either.
I don’t know where my original shirt is. Of course it most likely wouldn’t fit, seeing as how it was probably a boy’s medium, and I’m now an adult extra-medium. Dad still has his - and my brother even wore it to the final Space Shuttle launch.
christmas 2018
But with the 50th Anniversary coming up, I thought of a fun Christmas present. How about getting those shirts re-made in the correct sizes? Michael sent me a snapshot of his carefully preserved shirt, and I touched it up (in Pixelmator) and submitted it to Entripy, a great local producer of T-shirts who seem willing to do really small orders when they’re not cranking out 25,000 at once for the Raptors or Leafs.
I ordered 4 reproductions for me, my parents, and my brother. And then thinking of everyone else we’d see at Christmas, who have all kindly listened to our stories of the Apollo XI launch without complaining, I ordered a few more of a slightly different design. See if you can spot the difference.
Many thanks to Entripy for doing a great job on these. I hope everyone in my family wears the right one next July 16.
the designs
Moon Shot 1969 - I Was There
Moon Shot 1969 - I Wasn’t There, But I Know Somebody Who Was
the end result
(I’m holding a reproduction of the July 21, 1969 New York Times, headline “MEN WALK ON MOON.” Thanks for that, Michael!)