Five Steps To Glory

My cellphone spies on me. The phone and its ever-increasing array of apps, evidently added whenever I engage in one of the required software updates, seem to be constantly monitoring my activities, conducting some kind of unknowable, algorithmic analysis, and then sending me unwanted messages to announce their conclusions. As a result, I get weird, random notices like “you’re using your phone less this week than last week.” Since I don’t personally log the time I spend on my phone, I have no way of knowing whether these reports are accurate or not. I guess I just have to take my phone’s word for it.

This week I got a new message, one that I think came from an “exercise” app that was added in a recent software/operating system update. The message said something like: “Hey, you’re using the stairs more than you usually do!” My initial reaction was that it is creepy that my phone is tracking my stair usage and trying to function as a kind of clapping, enthusiastic personal trainer, urging me to get off my keister and continue to increase my daily count of steps. But then I wondered how in the world my stair count has increased, as I have not been making a conscious effort toward that goal.

After some careful consideration, I realized that the phone’s stairstep analysis had to relate to a domino-like series of events at work. The first domino was that the coffee maker on my floor stopped functioning. That meant that I walk over to the nearest coffee maker on my floor, which happened to be one building over–a journey that requires me to go up and down the five stairs shown above. Add in the fact that I guzzle a ridiculous number of cups of coffee each work day, so that I have been constantly ascending and descending these five steps, and you evidently end up with enough stair usage for my phone to take notice and send along some encouragement.

My initial reaction to this realization was to be surprised that even a few trips up and down five steps would make a difference to my phone. Then I thought that maybe, to keep my phone pal happy, I should continue to use the coffee maker in the next building, even after my coffee maker is fixed. And I also started to think that maybe there were other things I could do to add a few additional stair-climbing episodes to my workday, so that my phone and its apps will be even more thrilled at my efforts.

Why should I care whether my phone thinks I’m a lazy lard-ass? I don’t know, but I do. Having a Type A, get a good report card mindset in the cell phone age has its challenges.

In Search Of . . . Keys And Cellphones

Are you one of those people who constantly misplaces your keys, your cell phone, or other items, and then spends a lot of time searching for them? Do you regularly call your own cell phone, hoping that the ring or buzz will help you to find it? Are you to the point where you feel like the quest for your keys and cell phone should be featured on an episode of In Search Of . . . , as if they were as tantalizing as the Loch Ness Monster or UFOs?

An article from the U.K. offers some tips from a psychologist and well-being practitioner about how to stop the constant searching. (You’ll know the article is from the U.K. because it uses delightfully weird U.K.isms like “causing aggro” and “flatmates.”) The expert makes a lot of suggestions, from the very fundamental (get more sleep, because lack of sleep contributes to forgetfulness) to the very specific (consider putting a brightly colored ribbon on your keys to make it easier to find them) to the very technical (use key tags and find my phone apps), coupled with some reassurance (just because you regularly misplace your keys and your cellphone doesn’t mean you’re on the verge of dementia).

The best suggestion, in my view, is to give your cellphone and your keys a designated “home” and make sure that you always put them there, until you’ve formed an ingrained habit that becomes second nature. I always put my phone and my keys in the same place and never have to worry about searching for them. Of course, being such a creature of habit might make you worry about becoming too anal–but that’s better than fruitlessly searching for your keys and phone every morning.

Actual Versus Virtual, Again

It seems as though we are confronted with the conversion from actual to virtual at every turn these days. It has happened with newspapers, with meetings and conferences, and now it is happening with sports tickets, too.

I’m taking some client friends to Saturday’s Ohio State football game against Penn State. In the old days this would involve collecting physical tickets, like those shown above, and a physical parking pass to allow us to park in a good spot come Game Day, and then distributing the actual tickets to the members of the group at the pre-game tailgate so they could get through the gates of Ohio Stadium and get to their respective seats by kickoff.

But, with Ohio State at least, those physical ticket days are gone. Now the tickets are virtual, and you gather and transfer them electronically. It involves downloading yet another app, establishing a Ticketmaster account, directing Ticketmaster to distribute the tickets, and then entering email addresses so the ticket recipient gets notice of the transfer and can claim them. So far I seem to have been able to follow the instructions and successfully make the transfers, but the rubber won’t really meet the road until we get to Ohio Stadium Saturday night and start trying to scan in using bar codes on our phones. I sure hope everyone in my group remembers their cellphones and keeps their phones adequately powered!

I’m sure the virtual tickets are cheaper for the University, and the process has the added virtue of gathering email addresses that can be used for future notices and alerts. I still prefer the actual, physical tickets, however. It was comforting to have the tickets in hand and ready to hand out, and the glossy cardboard ducats themselves made nice souvenirs of your visit to the ‘Shoe. The cardboard parking pass had the added handy feature of a map on the back side that could guide you to your lot.

But those are the old ways, and they are going, going, gone as our worlds become increasingly centered on the apps on our handheld devices.

Saving Photos

My cellphone is old, and I regularly get messages telling me I’m up to storage capacity on things like phone messages and photos, and it’s time to start deleting.  The phone messages aren’t hard to get rid of — the fact that I haven’t deleted them already is just due to inattention, really — but the photos are a much harder call.

Sure, I could dump every photo that I’ve ever taken onto my home computer or store them in the cloud, but that’s not really a true solution — you just end up with a huge array of photos that are creating storage capacity issues somewhere else.  And if you’ve ever tried to find that one photo you are thinking of in an indiscriminate mass, you know it can be a frustrating and time-consuming task.  It’s similar to the problem that many of our parents and grandparents had — they’d have boxes  and boxes of unorganized Kodak and Polaroid photos from family trips, reunions, and other events, and one of their long-lasting resolutions was to actually identify who was in the curled up and browned-out photos from the past and put them into some kind of meaningful order in photo albums.  In many families, like mine, that just never got done successfully.

In my view, the key is to suck it up and engage in careful editing on the cellphone itself, respecting the device’s storage issues and limiting your library to those really worthwhile photos that you think you actually might look at in the future.  Where are you most likely to look at photos, anyway?  These days, it’s on your cellphone, when you are with friends or waiting at an airport gate for a plane and want to remember a good time from the past without going through some elaborate storage retrieval process.

So, how do you make the call on what to keep and what to delete?  It’s easy enough to delete the out-of-focus shots, of course, and there are always some photos that, when you look at them later, you wonder why you took them in the first place.  But once you’ve discarded the chaff, it’s a lot harder.  How many photos of beautiful sunrises or sunsets do you want?  Which photos of family and friends should you keep indefinitely?  When I look at the older photos on my cellphone, I see that there’s a pattern:  I have kept photos of special people, and places and times that I want to remember.  There’s a photo of Mom and the rest of the Webner clan at her last family birthday party, for example, and photos of me and Kish on vacation, and the photo with this post that was taken on Lake Louise in Canada on a perfect June day when the color of the water and the backdrop of mountains was just dazzling and we walked along the edge of the lake just reveling in the scenery.

My test is simple:  what do I want to remember, and what really makes me smile?

 

Protecting Cell Phone Privacy

The Supreme Court issued an important ruling yesterday.  In a 9-0 decision, the Court ruled that police must obtain a warrant before they search the cellphones of people they have arrested.  The ruling won’t directly affect most of us — unless you’re planning on being arrested in the near future, that is — but it represents a significant recognition of the central role of cellphones in our lives and an important bit of line-drawing in the ongoing battle between personal privacy and law enforcement.

In the ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts addressed both the pervasiveness of cellphones in modern America and the sweeping extent of information that people store on them.  From photos and video to address books, emails to calendars, financial information to maps, and other records of where we have been and who we have communicated with, cellphones are a handheld repository of huge amounts of very personal information about our private lives.  The Chief Justice thus reasoned that allowing warrantless searches of cellphones would be akin to the hated “general warrants” executed by the British authorities during colonial times that allowed them to rummage freely through homes in an effort to find some evidence of some kind of otherwise uncharged criminal activity — which is what drove the creation of the warrant clause of the Bill of Rights in the first place.

The Court also rejected arguments that a search of cellphones is needed to protect police officers or prevent the destruction of evidence.  When an arrest is made police can examine the cellphone to ensure that it can’t be used as a weapon and secure it, and if there is concern that evidence on the phone might be destroyed the officer can turn off the phone, or remove the battery, or place it in a foil bag to prevent any exchange of signals.  But before the police can access the cellphone and begin reviewing recent emails, the logs of recent calls, and other information, they must make the probable cause showing required by the Fourth Amendment and convince a judge to issue a warrant.

Two other points about the opinion seem worth emphasizing.  First, it was a unanimous decision.  For all of the fretting about political fracturing and the liberal and conservative wings of the Court, all of the Justices were able to agree on how to resolve a very central issue of how the Constitution works in modern life.  There’s nothing wrong with members of the Supreme Court disagreeing about legal issues — that’s why there are nine of them and the majority wins — but it’s nice to see the different perspectives coalesce around a simple, common approach to protecting individual liberty and privacy rights.

Second, many people have criticized jurists who return to the intent of the Framers of the Constitution and seek the meaning of its provisions in the historical context in which they were adopted, arguing that the Constitution should be a living document with meaning that changes in response to the realities of modern life.  Others contend that such an approach strips America’s core founding document of any objective significance and leaves it to mean whatever five Justices of the Supreme Court say it means.

The Court’s cellphone opinion, with its reference to the history of general warrants, shows how it is possible to draw upon historical context to identify the basic motivating principles underlying the Constitution and then apply those principles to the modern world.  Those observers who poke fun at purportedly hidebound efforts to discern “original intent” likely are happy with the opinion yesterday, but not about how the Court got to that result.