Scary Travel

I’m getting ready to go on my first trip outside of NJ or NYC since 2019. And I’m spending maybe too much time this morning obsessing and worrying about it. It’ll be a trip up to Troy NY, where I went to college, for a friend’s wife’s funeral service. I’ll be taking Amtrak from NYC to Albany tomorrow, staying overnight in Albany Sunday and Monday, and coming back on Tuesday morning.

This trip will definitely involve much more human contact than I’ve had since before the pandemic began. (I guess my NYCC trip last year got me close to a bunch of people, but that was a one-day in and out trip.) I’ll be taking NJ Transit into NYC, then changing to Amtrak. I’ll be staying in a hotel for two nights. And of course I’ll be at the service. I don’t really know how many people will be there, whether or not they’ll be masked, or how many are coming in from out of state. So lots of opportunity for virus transmission. And also for weird and/or awkward interpersonal encounters.

NJ Transit and Amtrak both still require masks, so that’s good. But I know that mask compliance has probably gone down over time. I know from experience that NJ Transit won’t make a big deal of it if somebody isn’t wearing a mask. I’m not sure about Amtrak.

This is also the first time I’ve ridden Amtrak in many years. As far as I can tell, it should be pretty straightforward. I have coach tickets both way. Coach on Amtrak looks like it should be reasonably comfortable. And it looks like boarding an Amtrak train is still much more straightforward than getting on an airplane. I won’t need to check any bags, and I don’t think they have any kind of security around carry-on bags, so I don’t need to worry about whether or not I have a plastic fork in there or more than three ounces of shampoo or whatever else is forbidden by the TSA these days.

I’ve built enough slack into my schedule to allow for NJT or Amtrak delays. The service is Monday, and I’m going up on Sunday. I think that Amtrak generally has enough flexibility that, if my NJT train to NYC is late and I miss the Amtrak train, I can get on a later one. And I’m going to take a NJT train that should get me into NYC about an hour before the Amtrak one leaves.

And the two nights in the hotel give me some flexibility and allow me to go to the service on Monday without having to drag my luggage with me and worry about getting from there directly back to the train station.

Still, I’m kind of freaking out about the trip. Worried about getting sick before it and having to cancel. Worried about travel issues. Worried about forgetting something. Worried about getting sick after the trip. Oh well.

Whenever I go on trips like this, I spend a lot of time thinking about what devices I’m bringing and what I’m leaving home. For this trip, I plan on bringing my iPhone (of course), AirPod Pros, iPad, and Kindle. I sometimes bring a Bluetooth keyboard for the iPad on a short trip, but I think I’ll skip that this time. Both my iPhone and iPad are old enough that their batteries don’t hold as much of a charge as they used to. I’m pretty sure Amtrak has power outlets at every seat, so I should be able to charge them up on the train. Another thing I’ve gotten paranoid about in recent years is the possibility of completely draining my iPhone battery, then not being able to use it for an Uber, or to show my ticket on the train. I do have an Anker battery back that I can use in a pinch, but that’s also a few years old and I’m not sure how much of a charge it holds these days.

And my last bit of uncertainty and slight paranoia comes from not having a real set schedule for what I’m doing while I’m in the area, outside of obviously the service itself. I know that some old friends will be around, but I’m not 100% sure who’s coming in or when they’re arriving or departing. So there might be people around on Sunday night who I can go to dinner with, or there might not. And there might be people looking to go to lunch on Monday, or there might not.

I’m just looking back at some notes, and I’m pretty sure that my last major trip was to Redmond in May 2019 for a Microsoft workshop. Looking back at my post-trip blog post on that, apparently that trip took a lot out of me. This will be shorter trip and doesn’t involve any cross-country airplane flights, or time zone changes, so this one shouldn’t be too hard on me.

Anyway, this overly-long post is just a dumb way for me to work out some anxiety and fill a little time between getting my laundry done and grabbing lunch today. I don’t think I’ve managed to say anything witty or useful, so my apologies if you’ve read this far, thinking there would be something good or funny in here.

Organizing Email (and related privacy issues)

I’ve been using OtherInbox Organizer to keep my Gmail inbox clean since 2011. it’s a service that scans your Gmail inbox and moves commercial email into various folders under a main “OIB” folder, for example “OIB/Shopping” or “OIB/Finance”. It’s a good service and it’s free. I’ve had some concerns with it over the years, partly because of it being free. Obviously, they’re doing something with the data from their users to make money. I don’t necessarily mind that, if they’re just using aggregate data and not telling people which brand of underwear I’m buying or which books I’m reading or anything like that.

I hadn’t given them much thought recently, but, yesterday, some stuff changed, so I did some digging. Part of their service is a daily review email that summarizes all the emails they’ve organized in the past 24 hours. That email has looked the same since I first signed up for an account, but the design on it changed yesterday, along with a couple of other minor things. And, previously, they’ve always applied two labels to each email: the main “OIB” label and the more specific folder label, like “OIB/Shopping”. Now, they’re only applying the specific label and not the general “OIB” one. (Gmail, of course, doesn’t really have folders, just labels, which can be nested to look like folders.) So I was wondering if they’d been acquired recently or if the service had been sold from one company to another.

Surprisingly, I didn’t find much information via Google. I did discover that they’d been acquired by Return Path, but that happened back in 2012. I might have read about that previously, but I don’t remember it. Up until yesterday, Return Path wasn’t mentioned in the summary email, but that changed with the redesign; the copyright notice at the bottom of the email now says Return Path instead of OtherInbox. Nothing about the changes has shown up on either the OtherInbox or Return Path Twitter feeds. And I couldn’t find any recent reviews or news about the service, other than seeing it included in some typical clickbait “top five ways to organize your email” articles, but none of those were that recent either.

Reviewing Return Path’s privacy policy, it sounds like they’re only sharing aggregate and/or anonymized data with their (business) customers, not personally identifiable data, so that’s good. If I was worried about that, I’d probably switch to SaneBox. Their service costs money, so their users are actually their customers; they’re not selling the data at all. But they charge $7 per month for their service, for their low-end accounts. (It goes up to $36 per month for their high-end accounts.)

Or, I could just use Gmail tabs. They were introduced in 2013, after I started using OtherInbox, so I’ve never really tried them. I think I did notice at one point that they only work with the regular Gmail client and don’t affect the view of the inbox through a third-party client like the mail client on iOS. (And I really want to have a clean inbox on iOS, so that could be an issue for me.)

Of course, if I’m worried about privacy, and being the product rather than the customer, I could probably switch from Gmail to a paid email provider also. I’ve considered switching to FastMail in the past. Their standard account is $5 per month, which is pretty reasonable. Combining FastMail and SaneBox would give me an email account with great organizing tools and no obvious privacy issues. (I’m pretty sure SaneBox would work with FastMail.)

For now, though, I’m going to stick with Gmail and OtherInbox Organizer, and just keep an eye on the Organizer product and see if anything weird is going on with it. The recent changes may just be the result of some long overdue maintenance work. Or they could be related to some further changes that could compromise privacy and/or make the service less useful.

progress

Over the course of this week, I managed to get through chapters 6 through 9, and most of chapter 10, in the 70-536 book. I’d like to have finished chapter 10 today, but I’m feeling a little under the weather, and I can’t really concentrate on anything too complex right now. So maybe tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep.

I’m hoping I can get through the remaining chapters (11 through 16) next week, then take the exam on Saturday April 3, maybe.

skipping San Diego

Hotel reservations for San Diego Comic-Con opened up today. I briefly tried getting on the reservation site from work, but I couldn’t get through, and gave up. I just checked from home, and the only hotel they have left is about 7 miles from the convention center. So, I think, between that, and not being about to get a four-day pass, I’m going to skip the con this year. It’ll be weird, not being there. And I’m definitely going to have to come up with some other plan for a summer vacation, otherwise I think I’ll probably crack by August.

Missing Sync

I just installed Missing Sync on my Mac. I’ve got it all set up to sync my contacts and calendars between the Mac and the BlackBerry over Bluetooth. Sweet. I encountered a few bumps while setting it up, but I think I’ve ironed out all the weird little conflicts, and it’s working OK now.

I’ve still got the BlackBerry Desktop Manager software installed on my Vista machine, but I don’t think I’m going to use it for anything except maybe software installs.

Overall, the Storm is working out pretty well so far. I haven’t had any random reboots, software glitches, or anything like that. I’m getting used to the touchscreen and virtual keyboards.

In terms of my overall “holy grail” quest for maximum syncing between all my devices, I think I’m actually doing a lot better than I would have ever expected. I’ve got my contacts & calendar on my Mac, on the web, on my iPod Touch, and now on my BlackBerry. On my Vista PC, I’ve only got my contacts, but I can always get to the calendar on the web.

On the random notes side, I have Backpack on the web, accessible through FrontPocket on the iPod Touch, and through the mobile version of the BackPack site on the Storm. It would be cool if I could directly sync Backpack to the notes app on the iPod Touch and/or the Storm, but that doesn’t seem likely at this point.

On the e-mail front, I have access to all of my e-mail accounts on both the iPod Touch and the Storm now. I think the iPod Touch is a little nicer to use for e-mail than the Storm, mainly because it has full IMAP support. The BIS solution on the Storm really just forwards mail to the device. Sometimes, it seems to be able to mirror read/unread marks and deletions back to the server, but I’m not sure if it’s doing that for all my accounts. I think I’ve figured out that, for my Lotus Notes e-mail, if I delete a message on the Storm and tell it to delete that message on the server, it *will* remove the message from my Notes inbox, but it doesn’t actually delete it. I’m not 100% sure on that. I think I need to mess around with it some more.

dnrTV – Generics

I keep meaning to watch dnrTV, but I never seem to get around to it. I need to find about an hour where I can sit still in front of the computer, and give it my full attention, and that isn’t easy lately. I did just watch show #9, with Venkat Subramaniam talking about generics in C#. This is one of a handful of topics that I’ve got on my mental to-do list to learn more about. I see that show 105, the most recent show, is also about generics, so maybe I’ll try and watch that one tomorrow.

There are a number of shows on CSLA.NET, which is another topic I really need to learn about. I really need to talk myself into watching this stuff more often, and maybe watching a little less Frisky Dingo!