Living in the Future

Tag: Life

  • Is group chat making you sweat?

    10. Chat reminds you that you’re behind. Group chat feels like you’re chasing something all day long. What’s worse, group chat often causes “return anxiety” — a feeling of dread when you’re away for a while and you come back to dozens (hundreds?) of unread lines. Are you supposed to read each one? If you don’t, you might miss something important. So you read up or skip out at your own risk. All the while you’re trying to piece together interleaving conversations that may refer to other things you haven’t seen yet. And just when you’re caught up, you’re behind again. It’s like your working two jobs — the work you’re supposed to do, and the work of catching up on what you missed that probably didn’t matter (but you won’t know until you read back).

    I write a lot about communication. It’s something that is very important to me. There are a lot of good points about chatting in large groups of people (like in Slack). I totally agree with the points raised, but I think chat apps like Slack are doing well to actually cut down on noise in group chat, because not everything has to be sent to every person, but there’s still a lot of transparency in what messages are being sent where.

    Slack also offers 1 on 1 chat, and ad-hoc small groups for chat, so it’s the best of all worlds when you want to communicate with a team or group of people.

    > Is group chat making you sweat? — Signal v. Noise — Medium

  • A Diminishing Willingness to Do or Try New Things

    The technological inertia of adulthood, signified by a diminishing willingness to do or try new things.

    I have been trying, without a great deal of success, to get my friends interested in using Slack to communicate with one another. Slack is a great service with mobile apps, desktop apps, and a really slick web interface that makes communicating with bigger groups of people really simple and easy.

    However, I’ve been trying to get people jazzed about better communication services for the better part of 10 years now, and I’m mostly thwarted at every turn. I honestly feel, deep in my heart, that this failing isn’t because the services I’m advocating for (Google Wave, Facebook Messenger, Google+, Twitter, Google Hangouts, Slack) are objectively bad.

    That being said, I also don’t think my friends, the people I want to keep in touch with the most, are idiots for not being as excited in the next big thing as I am. I am always on the lookout for new technology, but I know I’m rare in being that way. But I also know that there is value in what I’m trying to do.

    When I first got a cell phone, SMS was the only method of communication I used (aside from the very occasional phone call). When I first got an email address, I would occasionally use it to email friends, but its much more vital use was to get me logged in to MSN Messenger.

    I’ve always subscribed to a vast number of different communications services (as I broke down in my last post about this stuff), and I use many of them to keep in touch with just a handful of people. The people I talk to on a regular basis interact with me in a startling number of ways:

    • Some people I know I can reach most easily with SMS
    • Some I know will only check Facebook sporadically
    • Some who keep data turned off unless it’s an emergency
    • Some people I will only message through Google Hangouts
    • Some people answer messages during the day through one chat platform, but use another platform the rest of the time (even though both are available to them at all times).
    In trying to make Slack a thing with my closest friends, what I’m really trying to do is make it really easy for those people to know exactly where and how they can reach me and each other, all the time. Maybe, for some people, that’s actually a failed premise. It’s just something that’s never going to happen.
    It might be that no matter how hard I try, some people are just going to send me a text message when they want to reach me. And perhaps, that won’t change.
    Liberal youth grow older and more conservative, even if their values never actually change in the process. I’m going to do my best to be adaptable, while advocating for new and better at every turn. We don’t have to define ourselves by who we are now, we can choose to present ourselves as the best we can be in the future.
    Communication is a social contract we all enter into, and having it formalized might be scary or uncomfortable to some people. I don’t think it’s too lofty a goal to aim for better than a 14 person group thread in Facebook Messenger as a way for people from all walks of life to interact and figure their lives out. We can do better, and while I’m suggesting one specific option, I’m just trying to do the best I can today.
  • Post a proper linked Instagram photo to Twitter, like a Gentleman

    Post a proper linked Instagram photo to Twitter, like a Gentleman

    When you used to post Instagram photos to Twitter, it would automatically expand the photo in Twitter, to show your beautiful shot in all its glory. However, when Twitter launched its own photo sharing natively, it started blocking the auto-expanding of photos from Instagram, so pictures looked ugly as heck when shared from Instagram to Twitter. Here’s what I mean:

    Sharing images the regular way (like I did above) leaves this text-based tweet, leaving users to guess what the picture is of, because neither Instagram nor Twitter wants to cede ground on letting users of both platforms see pictures from the others’ social network.

    However, I’ve come up with a fix, and it involves a great service called IFTTT. If you’re not using it already, do yourself a favour and go sign up. Once you’ve done that, all you have to do is go to this link, and you’ll be able to post directly from Instagram to Twitter, with a full resolution version of the photo, while still maintaining a link back to Instagram in case people want to go check out your other photos. That looks like this:

    As you can see, that’s way better, but you still get the link back to Instagram.

    PS. If you’re using this recipe from IFTTT, you shouldn’t select the native Twitter sharing when posting in Instagram, or you’ll end up with a double post, one with the image, and one without. And nobody wants that.

    Post a proper linked Instagram photo to Twitter, like a gentleman. by robattrell – IFTTT

  • Why Basic Income is so Important

    Canada’s prior experiment with a BIG [(Basic Income Guarantee)], the Mincome experiment in Manitoba in the 1970s, found that a BIG did not cause people to stop working — with two important exceptions. The first was women with infants at home, who effectively used the BIG to purchase maternity leave. We should expect a different response from women in modern-day Canada, where maternity leave benefits are much more extensive. But where child care and other supports for working parents are insufficient, we may see responses to a BIG that will show us those cracks in the system.

    The other group whose employment levels decreased under Mincome was teenage boys. A closer look reveals that with a basic income guarantee, male high school students were more likely to make the decision to stay in school until graduation. Given the Ontario government’s aim of increasing graduation rates and the need for a highly educated population, it will be important to understand how people’s labour market decisions interact with other important decisions, like the decision to improve their skills and buy a better long-term future for themselves and their families.

    > We Should Applaud Ontario’s Plans To Pilot A Basic Income Guarantee | Laura Anderson

  • Communication is Broken

    Communication is Broken

    Communication is unbelievably important for a properly functioning society. And after ranting a little on Twitter this morning, now seems like as good a time as any to break down the best communication tools, why they’re good, and what they’re good for.

    Today’s communication is broken, we can’t talk effectively with the people we’re closest to, and the very services that aim to bring us closer together are keeping us further apart than they need to. We can do better!

    Let’s keep it really simple to start: 1-on-1 communication. It’s really hard to get this wrong, because it’s fundamentally the easiest thing to do. Effectively, communication between two people can be public, or private. There’s a continuum of more vs. less private, but almost every platform has options for private individual communication. Believe it or not, some people ONLY use these kinds of communication. Here are a few examples (they’re all really old school):

    • Phone Call (voice; tied to a phone number)
    • Email (text, with attachments; tied to an email address)
    • SMS (text, maybe photos; tied to a phone number)

    Like I mentioned, some platforms advertise themselves as much more than private 1 on 1 communication, but they do still have that aspect available. These aren’t as limited, but can function in such a narrow way:

    • Snapchat (ephemeral photos/video and text; tied to an account on one phone at a time)
    • Skype (text, media attachments and video/audio calls; tied to an account with possibility of phone number)
    • iMessage (Text, photo/video, audio message; tied to an Apple ID, but can add phone numbers or email addresses)

    Now, the services covered so far have mostly been private (Snapchat now has *public* Stories), but there are also communication methods that let you communicate with one person, but in public.

    • Facebook Wall Post (text, photos/video; tied to Facebook accounts)
    • Twitter Mention (text, photos/video; tied to Twitter accounts)
    • Google Hangout on Air (audio/video; tied to Google accounts)

    These companies all have their respective private messaging platforms as well (Facebook Messenger, Twitter Direct Messages, and Google Hangouts), which are useful for both individual and group messaging, but they all have their limits, and are easy to use inefficiently.

    Now, instead of getting to the best services that offer the most diverse communication right away, let’s go through an exercise first.

    I’m going to attempt to make a list of all of the communication platforms I make use of in the average week. This is a combination of mobile/desktop, 1-way or 2-way communication, personal/business…this is as exhaustive as I can be on the matter (in no particular order, I’m just going through my phone and computer):

    Google Calendar
    Phone
    FaceTime
    Google Drive
    Nuzzel
    Flipboard
    SoundCloud
    Periscope
    Podcasts
    Reddit
    Google+
    Facebook
    Trello
    IFTTT
    Google Photos
    Facebook Messenger
    Snapchat
    Twitter
    Google Keep
    LinkedIn
    Hangouts
    Email
    Kijiji
    Blogging
    Television
    YouTube
    Slack
    Instagram
    SMS
    iMessage
    Peach
    RSS
    Blogs
    News Sites
    Customer Service Live Chat
    Talking in Person

    I’m sure, even given this exhausting list, that I’ve missed a couple of really obvious communication methods. That being said, they all have various reasons why I use them. I use some more than others, and for a variety of reasons some get used very little (sorry, Peach).

    Having said all of that, The best communication methods I have at my disposal are easy to understand, but have diverse uses. I’m sure I could get by with any of these methods of communication on their own, but it would be difficult. Each has its limitations, and strengths.

    In a perfect world, we would all agree to have accounts for all of these services, and all use whichever one we feel like at a given time. However, for me, the following is (in my mind), a perfect set of tools to satisfy all communications needs. Order in this list is VERY important, and changes/improvements to any of these services could change the order.

    1. Slack
    If I have you on my Slack team, and I know you actually have the app on your phone/computer or visit the website from time to time, this is by far the way I’m going to contact you. The way Slack integrates with the rest of the items on this list makes its prime spot a no-brainer.

    2. Twitter
    I love Twitter (and would only be able to love it more if they got rid of the 140 character limit, though there are plenty of reasons why that’s challenging). Twitter integrates well with Slack, and lets me follow cool people to keep up with the world better than any service I know how to. It’s also a semi-public conversation, and so you can kind of see what everybody is up to.


    3. Hangouts
    Having Hangouts on this list is a no-brainer, simply because of the video chat capability. Hangouts also integrates well with Slack, although I don’t use that feature much, but Slack’s link control is so good that it’s plenty for my needs.

    4. Email
    You always need a fall-back. Sometimes, you’re talking with a stranger, or a distant acquaintance. Sometimes, you just want to be notified of something that pertains to just you. In many cases, email is a good way for people you don’t have on Slack or Hangouts to get in touch with you privately (although Twitter is really fine for that too).

    I’ve extolled the virtues of Slack before, and maybe it’s a failing on my part that so few of the people I’m closest to really get its appeal (since the people I do use it with really seem to get a lot out of it, and I use it extensively even just for my own personal non-communication needs).

    I love Facebook Messenger, but really only because many people have Facebook accounts. If the people I talk to most on Messenger were on my Slack team and actually used the service, I wouldn’t use Messenger nearly as much. And having said that, though Messenger has taken great strides to make messaging fun, fast, and beautiful, it’s INCREDIBLY difficult to keep track of multiple threads, and for groups of close friends who talk about lots of different things, it’s a nightmare. Seriously, use a Slack team for your group of close friends.

    I’m going to keep advocating for Slack and Twitter, because they have been essential to my modern life and I love communicating with them so much. I’m interested to see how communication changes as the online world creeps more and more into our every interaction, and what the next generation of communication services look like.

  • 6 Months of Weight Loss (January 27)

    6 Months of Weight Loss (January 27)

    This week, unless something goes horribly wrong, I will formally hit the goal weight that I set back at the end of June. This doesn’t technically count as ‘making something’, but it definitely took a lot of work.

    Anyhow, writing about it and posting about it and talking about it all the time has been incredibly helpful. I don’t know if 210 lbs is where I’ll end up, but when I was 250 lbs just 6 months ago, it certainly seemed impossible.

    At this exact moment, I weigh 210.63 lbs, which is satisfying all on its own. When I started (although BMI is a horribly outdated measurement tool, I was about 15 pounds into ‘obese’ (about a 32 in BMI, 30 being obese). At the moment, I’m at exactly 27 (25 or less being considered ‘normal weight’). If you know anything about BMI, you’ll know it’s horribly outdated, but I have been using an online tool that attempts to make the calculation a little bit more useful for the modern world. By that metric, I’m almost exactly at the high end of healthy weight, and I’m happy already, because I feel so much better than I did.

    I don’t know what the next 6 months will hold, when I can ride my bike again, but I’m looking forward to seeing what happens now that food doesn’t have such a strong hold on me.

  • Damien bowls a strike! (January 26)

    Damien bowls a strike! (January 26)

    I missed a day. Well, I didn’t miss it, but I certainly didn’t post anything here about what I did. I don’t really feel bad about that, because I’ve been making so many things this year that I don’t feel the need (or sometimes, make the time) to write about all of my projects here.

    Anyhow, on Monday, I went bowling with some of my friends. I really like taking a set of photos with my phone, because Google Photos (on iOS and Android) not only backs up photos, but lets you create amazing GIFs like the one above, from up to 50 photos.

    If you don’t use Google Photos, you totally should, you can get unlimited photo and video backup, shared albums, and so much more. It’s amazing. And when I’m older, Damien bowling this perfect strike will be preserved in all its glory.

  • A downtown sunset (January 20)

    A downtown sunset (January 20)

    I love taking pictures so much, and when I stepped off the bus yesterday, the sky looked absolutely gorgeous. I love looking at the sky, and around sunrise/sunset the colours are just unbelievable. I’m not normally able to capture the glory of the sky in such detail with my phone, but things just worked out here, and I’m getting a little better at making the phone work for me.

    Anyhow, this was one of the highlights of my day yesterday, and though you probably saw it, it’s my ‘thing’ for today.

    A photo posted by Rob Attrell (@robattrell) on Jan 19, 2016 at 4:44pm PST
  • Applying for a Job (January 6)

    Applying for a Job (January 6)

    Some days, you spend hours with your face right in front of a computer monitor, but at least there are ends-of-day like today that make it mostly worth it. I would love a job where my Chemistry, science and technology skills and knowledge are required, but my job search focus right now is in communications and media.

    Below is why I think I would be a good candidate for a media/communications focused job. If you know somebody who is hiring that might be looking for somebody like me, please share this with them, I would REALLY appreciate it! Thanks!

    This letter is in reference to the job posting at [REDACTED] for [REDACTED]. I am submitting this letter because I think that I, Rob Attrell, am an excellent candidate for the position. The combination of my experience and education will show that I have the requirements needed to excel in the role.

    Going to university, I wasn’t aware how important communications would end up being to me. I studied Chemistry at the University of Ottawa from 2006 to 2011, completing Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. On its own, that doesn’t qualify me for the position, but it was a formative and necessary experience.

    I learned many important skills during my studies and research that lend themselves to work in communications. First and foremost, my projects over the course of these degrees have given me a lifelong appreciation for the time and detail that goes into professional work. While preparing my Master’s thesis, I wrote and edited several major documents for both print and electronic media. That includes a textbook chapter, several academic papers, and two thesis documents. This work typically took many weeks or months of planning and working with colleagues to come up with a polished final product.

    Of course, in addition to the tangible work done during my degree, there are many other important skills I learned and improved at while in graduate school. Time management, self-motivation, problem-solving, and multitasking were critical to my success in class and in the lab. To this day, I apply those same attributes in all of my work, both at NSERC in my last full-time position as a planning analyst in Corporate Planning and Policy, and with my extra-curricular and freelance activities. I am constantly adapting my skill-set and looking for new and interesting things to learn, and projects and problems to tackle.

    For the last 4+ years, since the end of my degree, I have been devoting a whole lot of my free time to learning the principles of communications. I write regularly for my own interest on a personal blog, and I been creating more varied media like video and podcasts for the last 2 years as well. I am very involved in social media, and I’m always quick to try out the newest social medium or technology. I have been studying and learning web design, user interface/experience principles, and programming to maintain all the sites I’ve been managing since 2011 as well.

    I have spent a lot of time in the last few years working on strategies to gain traction in social media, as well as coming up with consistent branding and developing high-quality content. I also currently write freelance every weekday morning for a Canadian technology website called MobileSyrup, which enables me to keep up with technology and writing, while also working on ongoing projects and developing my skills.


    Thank you.
  • A Big Day

    A Big Day

    It only makes sense that exactly three years (to the day) after doing my very first video on YouTube, I would cross the threshold of actually earning real money from Google. Let me tell you the story.

    For a little over a year, starting on July 4, 2011, I had been writing on my blog (which still exists to this day). December 1st, 2012, I made my first YouTube video, a Google+ Hangout live chat with my good friend, Carolyn Higman. You can go watch it, the quality of the video is relatively embarrassing, and a lot has changed since then.

    The first time I exposed my face to the world, three years ago to the day.

    As a point of comparison, here is the latest episode of Future Chat, recorded this past weekend:

    Over the years, a lot has changed. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that I still love teaching, helping, writing, and learning about technology. Here’s a brief timeline of my milestones on the internet.

    July 4, 2011 – I start Living In The Future, my blog, on my birthday. I published the first post the following day.

    December 1, 2012 – My first Google+ Hangout on Air.

    January 14, 2013 – I agree to begin work with Sons of Pluto, a band with my friends. Work includes recording their practices, shows, building their website, making promo videos, and running their social media accounts. Those guys are now working on an EP!

    February 7, 2014 – The first Future Tech Chat takes place. This is the spiritual successor to the first Hangout on Air from 2012, and the podcast continues on a weekly basis to this day under the more general “Future Chat“.

    March 27, 2014 – I make the first Attrell Update video. My sister and I go on to exchange videos on a weekly (or almost weekly) basis until December of 2014.

    May 20, 2014 – The first episode of Ottawhat is released, after Keegan, Amaan and I decide we should start an Ottawa-themed podcast about people.

    December 14-16, 2014 – East Meets West and Feedback debut, also marking the formal launch of UnwindMedia.com, a media network that is the home of my Internet-related work so far.

    November 5, 2015 – Ottawhat News, a satirical look at events around Ottawa, has it’s first viral post. In just a few days, over 65,000 people read about Peter Hayes and the Bier Markt.

    December 1, 2015 (Today) – In an inevitability of time, math, and fortune, Unwind Media finally passes the threshold for being paid real money for ads on the sites I run. It is now just a matter of time  now until a cheque from Google arrives. It’s not a lot of money, but it feels extremely good to hit that threshold.

    I really love making things, and being creative. I’ve been doing it for over 4 years and I’m more excited now than I ever have been. I’m looking really hard for a job right now, and the stuff I do on the side is the only thing keeping me sane at the moment, as it’s one creative outlet I have amidst filling out applications and writing cover letters.