Sleepless on a Redeye

On Monday, February 12, I was scheduled to fly nonstop from Los Angeles to Indianapolis on American Airlines. We were on track for a 10:00 AM departure when we pulled away from the gate and began our taxi to the runway. However, we experienced delays due to a malfunctioning flight computer, and after an hour we returned to the gate because the aircraft was taken out of service. Although it was announced that another plane would be brought in, the airline changed its mind, cancelled the flight, and rebooked me on a redeye flight with a connection in Charlotte. Thanks American.

It was difficult to sleep on the flight. Although I was not checking the time, it seemed as if I slept in 10-15 minute intervals because I recall awakening continuously throughout the duration of the 5-hour flight. On February 14, I happened to browse my sleep data on my Apple Health app, and this is what I saw:

   

It appears that during the redeye flight, I did not satisfy the criteria for being "in bed" for any portion of the night, as depicted by the absence of a purple bar in the "Tue" column. For some reason, my Health app does not appear to track "In Bed" data on weekends, at least not from the past few months of data that I reviewed, but perhaps there is a way to change that in a setting somewhere. Also, there is a pink "Asleep" legend, and given that I have no "asleep" data, I assume that I am missing either the software or hardware that is required to capture this information. In any case, it made me wonder what the criteria are for considering a person to be "in bed". If anyone has insight into this, please let me know!

My Uber 2017 Stats

I received an email from Uber today with my 2017 statistics:

Hooray, my Uber rating is 0.01 points above average! After a year of sobering news due to crazy national and international events, I suppose this is very welcome—assuming that it is not fake news. The email provided a link to more Uber 2017 stats. Happy Ubering!

Lee Family 2017 Year In Review

Greetings! Our Lee Family 2017 Year In Review is now available, and prior editions can be accessed here. As usual, our home movies are available on Victor's YouTube channel.

Fire Danger - iOS Emergency Alert

At 8:25 PM Pacific time today (12/6/2017), I received the following emergency alert on my iPhone 6 Plus running iOS 11.2:



This was not unexpected, as wildfires have been burning for a couple of days across Southern California. More information here and in the map below:

We are not currently in immediate danger, and I hope not to receive any more emergency alerts. Related story here.

Maybe Yelp is Not Quite So Evil

In November 2013, we celebrated my daughter’s 4th birthday at a place called Under the Sea. My wife and I thought that the facilities were good, but the poor customer service really ruined our (i.e., the adults, not the kids) experience. The staff was rude and unhelpful, as I stated in my review under my username of String T. (as in “String Theorist”). Additionally, I pointed out that the 5-star review provided by Jasmin A. needed to be discounted because she was an employee and therefore violated a Yelp content guideline for community reviews which aims to prevent conflicts of interest among other things.

Shortly after submission, I was shocked to discover that not only was Jasmin A.’s 5-star review prominently displayed as a Recommended Review despite its violation of a Yelp content guideline, my review was demoted to “not recommended” status but could be accessed by clicking on a link toward the bottom of the page. As a new Yelp contributor, I did not know it at the time, but Yelp explains how it programmatically categorizes reviews under “recommended” status. My review clearly did not pass muster despite it being an expression of my honest opinions and compliant with all of Yelp’s contributor guidelines. I felt at the time that Yelp was evil for its policies that resulted in censorship and bias.

Fast forward about 4 years. About a week ago, I had a surprisingly pleasant experience at a hole-in-the-wall barber shop/salon as well as a nearby hole-in-the-wall donut shop, so I thought I’d give Yelp another try by writing a couple of positive reviews. They were both immediately listed as Recommended Reviews. No drama there.

Out of curiosity, I went back to my original review of Under the Sea to find that it had been promoted to a Recommended Review and had been voted as “useful” by 19 people and “funny” by 3 people. I am not sure what triggered the re-classification, nor do I know when in the last 4 years it occurred, but nevertheless I wondered if maybe Yelp is not as evil as I had thought.



Then I noticed a little icon indicating that I had unread notifications. When I clicked on the icon, here’s what I saw:



Apparently Jasmin A. messaged me on 11/23/2013 to request a discussion about why I was so dissatisfied with the customer service. On 5/1/2014, after not receiving a reply from me (since I had not logged on to Yelp, nor do I recall receiving an email notification from Yelp), she blasted an angry response to my comment that her self-promoting 5-star rating of her employer was in violation of Yelp guidelines and was therefore unethical.

I took a screen shot of her messages and posted it to the Photos section of the Under the Sea page on Yelp to illustrate the kind of employee she was. I also reported her to Yelp, and about a week later, I received the following reply:



I thought the response by Yelp was appropriate and reflected a good-faith attempt to optimize the experience of the community it serves. I also felt that issuing a warning to Jasmin A. was appropriate, as a termination of her account or other similar action may have been too severe for the offense. In any case, I hope she learns that nothing good can come out of being rude and offensive. So maybe Yelp is not quite so evil after all. What do you think about Yelp?

United Airlines - Can We Game the System?

Remember when David Dao was forcibly removed from his United Airlines flight back in April 2017? Well, today I was checking in for my flight, and during the online checkin process, I was prompted with the following question that I had not previously seen:



Upon doing some research, I came across this article which says that United is now letting passengers bid on prices to give up their seats on overbooked flights, and it has "increased the maximum incentive payment offered passengers to voluntarily give up a seat on an overbooked flight to $10,000."

What if everyone clicked "Enter other amount in USD" and entered $10,000? Come on, America--we can unite (pun intended) on this issue! We can do this!

My Photo and Video Stats

I have a large external hard drive onto which I am able to fit my entire collection of digital photos and videos. In browsing some of the administrator functions associated with the external hard drive, I came across this page:



I noticed that as of today, I have a grand total of 110,118 pictures and 3,909 videos. I am assuming that "pictures" is inclusive of .JPG as well as raw (e.g., Canon's .CR2 format) and photoshop (.PSD) file. Soon I will be adding .HEIC files to my collection, as iOS 11 has replaced .JPG with .HEIC as its new default image file format--I assume that these files will fall under the "pictures" tally as well.

Finally, I assume that "videos" is inclusive of .MOV (the native format in Apple devices), .MTS (the native AVCHD format in my Canon camcorder), and .MP4 (the common format that is almost universally compatible with modern devices like desktops, laptops, mobile phones, tablets, and TV set top boxes). If so, then those numbers should be representative of my complete collection. A final note... while iOS 11 will be replacing the H.264 codec with HEVC, I believe videos will continue to have a .MOV container, so the file extension should not change.

So those are my stats. Do you know how many photos and videos you have in your collection?