Category: life

Safety Third…

On By JohnIn lifeLeave a comment

Ideas first

Tools second

Safety third

“But John,” you’ll exclaim, “safety always comes first!”

No, it doesn’t.

You would not have even considered safety at all if you didn’t have the idea to begin with.

Ideas come first — they’ll guide you to attempting and completing them. They give you direction. Purpose.

“Well, surely safety comes next!”

Nope.

Next, come tools. It would be folly to prioritize acquiring the “best of” every conceivable tool for every issue. Ideas will determine which tools you’ll need to make achieving that idea more efficient.

Safety? Once you have ideas of what you want to do, and once you have tools [to help get started, not “perfect tools”], then you’ll have to be aware of the risks.

I think I’ll have a meaningful sign made up to call those out. It’ll serve as a realistic reminder to help maintain focus.

Focus?

On By JohnIn lifeLeave a comment

While I have used this blog as a sort of personal sounding-board, I admit that it truly lacks some sort of focus. Or, at least, a direction… something to give it purpose.

It’s been a place for me to share

  • technical concepts, leanings, and learnings
  • some admittedly narrow views
  • an exploration of a few hobbies
  • some home-improvements
  • life changes
  • personal changes
  • intentionally becoming house-less, traveling around the country, and sharing our learnings about RVs
  • making, and eventually embracing, fundamental changes; traveling to share it
  • taking a bit of a fall
  • more life changes

Sure, it’s all rather interesting to me, but I feel it lacks focus — something to bring it all together.

I suppose those might be distilled even further: Writings. Life. Learning.

Refined to:

life = change + learning

Modern Problems

On By JohnIn annoying, life, workLeave a comment

So, I’m one of those people with a few credit cards: debit and credit accounts, personal and joint, plus business. Actually, eight of them. I only use two of them regularly…because eight is too much liability to walk around with.

The ones I use, I call “Personal” for regular use and “Business” for obvious reasons.

I also embrace modern technologies and use an iPhone and Apple Watch on which I’ve synchronized those cards with the Wallet app – plus Apple Pay. So that’s three accounts that are at my fingertips for easy use when they’re needed, without putting others at risk unless I intentionally take them out of the desk when needed.

Anyway, I’m shopping online the other day and notice that the proprietor has also added the option to use Apple Pay, so I click through.

After a bit of confusion about the shipping address and email address – they’re correct; still entirely unchanged, in fact, and I only clicked on Save – things processed just fine.

It wasn’t until a few hours later that I received an alert from one of my corporate card saying a purchase was approved. Hmm… I haven’t been on a trip recently… and that was meant to be on my personal card.

What’d I miss?

Turns out that with my state of somewhat unstable manual dexterity, I must’ve swiped on my Apple Watch, and switched to a different payment card.

Perhaps there will be an accessibility option for iOS/Watch/touch devices where we can tune the sensitivity of things like touch/drag/tap to accommodate those whose finger usage isn’t quite perfect.

Maybe some periodic validation of information with computer users when things don’t look quite right. We also need to find out why Apple Pay thinks “United States” doesn’t equal “United States”.