I've talked about this before. I don't talk about being homeless a lot. It's painful, living in hotels for two and a half years. It's a short story if I leave out a lot of the detail. Two and a half years ago, around Christmas, we were evicted from our apartment in Mission Viejo because my publisher sat on their asses getting my advance check to me for my book, Getting An IT Help Desk Job For Dummies (available on Amazon, cheap plug). I worked my ass off to finish that book. 330 pages in three months. They didn't care. Companies don't care, so we were screwed. We figured we'd be out for a month or two then find a new place.

The thing is, nobody would take us.

It's easy. Just have the biggest recession since The Great Depression, mix in one guy with no college degree and 20 years of professional writing and IT experience, a disabled daughter, and a wife who has to take care of said daughter 24/7, then throw in shitty credit and families that lack any kind of real empathy, and you have us. By 2008 I was making $75,000 a year with full benefits. After the recession hit, I could barely make $20 an hour on contract. I moved from job to job, working my ass off, mostly for idiots who refused to listen to simple reason, but those are different stories.

I will say, I had this one client for six months. He ran a small business in Tustin. He wanted to automate his business operations, and had heard I was the guy. We talked and he told me he wanted a system that did X, Y, and Z and all for free. I told him that X and Y could be done but that Z would need to be handled by a different tool and there would need to be integration and that he'd have to spend some money. He hired me, but he didn't listen. I spent six months trying to convince him that there was no way in hell there was any system out there that would do exactly what he wanted, out of the box, for nothing. Nice guy, but dumb as a box of bricks.

Eventually, the jobs ran out. Nobody was hiring any more and the economy was changing. I was too old, had too much experience, and didn't have a degree. I worked for SendGrid for almost a year earning $65,000 with meager benefits, but was fired after I pointed out some marketing material lied about some stuff the company was capable of doing for clients. Learn that as a lesson, kids. Honesty doesn't win you anything in this world. I got a gig with Mirantis for a bit, but their own internal squabbling resulted in my position being eradicated before I could even get started, so there's that.

That's when the book gig landed on my feet, which ultimately resulted in us losing our apartment. We fought tooth and nail to get back on our feet. We begged and begged and begged. We fought with our respective fathers, Rima and I. I've personally spent what seems like months worth trying to convince my father that the help he was giving us wasn't helping. We made several abortive attempts to buy an RV to live in, one of which resulted in us getting robbed outright to the tune of $3,500, by a former OC Sheriff, no less. All the while, Rima is keeping Leah in school and getting a college education, and I eventually start working for Uber. All that time, we still have to pay the hotel, usually money we didn't have.

So, two years later, we're still in hotels and we get a letter from the Anaheim Housing Authority. They've pulled Leah from the California State Section 8 waiting list at the request of Regional Center of Orange County, the State services group that helps with her disabilities. So, we did as they asked and we started to feel as if things were finally going to change.

We filled out the application while at a hotel in Santa Ana. The forms said we didn't have to live in Anaheim, but apparently that's not how they feel internally, so we were declined. We moved to a hotel in Anaheim and applied again. They looked over everything and we were declined again, this time for insufficient information. Of course, we had sent the information, it's just that someone else looked at the file and didn't know what was going on, so they sent out the denial. Maybe I could get a job there making their shit work.

Finally, we get them to understand they have what they asked for and they finally approve our application! Good lord, the heavens opened up that day, but only about a fraction of a second. So, we go in, have a meeting, get our fingerprints taken, a background check run, and handed a voucher to go talk to a landlord at one apartment building. That's where we find out about Kathy. Kathy Nutter. Kathy Nutter, the head of the Orange County Community Housing Corporation, a non-profit group that has been operating in Anaheim for 40 years.

She was so nice. She talked to us, we told her our story, and she empathized! So few people were doing that, it felt new. She agreed to let us rent from her and we started doing the paperwork. She arranged to have some couches a board member was giving away moved in and it turned out her daughter had a fridge she didn't need anymore, so we got that too. We finalized things, got the keys, and started moving our stuff.

That turned out to be a mistake.

When we had first seen the apartment, we didn't see any cockroaches or smell anything, but by the time we started moving in, we found the roaches everywhere and a smell of urine in the kitchen that was just overbearing. We stayed in the hotel one more night. The next night, out of money from the move, we stayed at the apartment. We cobbled together sleeping arrangements and eventually fell asleep, only to be awoken by the screams of our daughter who had roaches crawling on her face and body. We haven't stayed there another night since.

We told Kathy what happened and she appeared to be shocked. She said she'd have the maintenance people over there in no time to take care of things. They sprayed something and went away. A few days later, when we checked, we found plenty of roaches so we told Kathy again. She sent her people over again and they put down gel and gave us bugbombs. We bagged up some of our things that weren't in boxes and set off about eight bombs. Two days later, we find plenty of roaches dead, but more than enough to sustain horror alive and well, crawling all over the place.

Kathy said she'd never had a complaint of roaches or bad smells before. Funny thing is, I spoke to a neighbor and she said they had roaches and had complained many times, and that a sewer line had broken last year and stunk up the entire building for several weeks. Wow.

We've taken pictures and videos. We've documented all of our communications with Kathy. We gave her every chance in the world to make it right, and she didn't take a single one. It turns out that the loving, friendly, helpful, generous Kathy Nutter we thought we knew was just another sleazy slumlord like all the rest. The rent for that place was $1400. We were going to pay less than $400 a month for our share, the Anaheim Housing Authority would cover the $1,100 remaining, and it was a pig sty at best.

Now, I haven't even mentioned the homeless guy living, literally, on our front doorstep or the half dozen or so drug dealers who were running shop in the alleyway behind the building. Everything about this deal just felt shady, and we were being screwed over royally. We thought we were safe, having made it into the helpful arms of a HUD approved group. Things just keep getting better, though.

We asked Kathy to reimburse us for the cost of the hotel. That was denied. We asked for compensation for the money we spent moving in. That was denied. We contacted AHA and asked them to come look at the place again. They did that, saw how bad things were, and said they would cancel their contract with OCCHC. They then suggested we move into another apartment, which looked good from what we could tell, but turned out to be managed by Kathy Nutter, as well. Isn't that a kick in the pants!?

So, we are now asking the AHA to help us get on another waiting list or help us fix this problem some other way, and so far we haven't heard back yet. It seems they might have hung us out to dry, as well. Only time will tell.

To get our money back, we need to take the OCCHC to court. Small claims. Yay. So that's what we're doing now. And back in a hotel. Me, three weeks into a horrible backpain episode. Leah still going to school. Bills have to be paid. Paychecks only come in when they do, and it's all hell.

So, this is that Fuck You I was talking about. It's the Fuck You that the Universe is giving us. The Jumbo Middle Finger of Fate.

I tell you, it's the most awesome thing ever.

You might not have noticed, since you’re most likely looking at your smartphone, but a significant amount of time people spend on the internet is through a mobile device, dominantly said smartphone. We’ve got some nifty charts lined up from ComScore so you can see just how much.

[[Had an image here, but need to go track it down. Hopefully I don't forget. ed.]]

As is illustrated in the above chart, things start shifting around 2012 when mobiles started to take over from desktops (this includes laptops, I presume), and that gap continues to widen. In general, this shows what we likely already know just from looking around; when you need the internet, you reach for your phone around two out of every three times. What’s even more interesting is that age is not a factor anymore. Older people may not use the internet as much, or grab their smartphone as often, but the trend is remarkably stable across the scope.

[[Same here. ed.]]

In all cases, 19 to 65 and up, people tend to grab their smartphone first. This chart shows it’s when the user has both a smartphone and a tablet, but the trending is clear. Mobiles are taking over the internet. What you don’t need a chart to see is that so-called phablets appear to have won, with even Apple having rolled out a larger mobile with the release of the iPhone 6 Plus, but that’s a discussion for another story. Here, we are going to talk about the future of computing, and the above data is where we are at now.

Pocket Power

Computing comes in many diverse forms these days, there are smartphones (natch), feature phones (the not-cool ones), tablets, laptops in various form factors, and desktops of endless variety. If only that were it, however. There are also smart TVs, smart DVD and Blu-Ray players, video game consoles like the Wii U, PlayStation 4, and the Xbox One, scads of media devices like Apple TV, Roku, and the Chrome Stick, and enough smart watches to choke a Blue Whale. If that wasn’t enough, there are photo frames, radios, and even TV remotes that use the internet to make them better (though that’s debatable).

In part, it’s no wonder people gravitate to their mobile devices when seeking information. There’s so much… internet, it’s hard to break it down into the small, easy-to-swallow pieces user’s desire. This is a primary emotional component in why certain apps do so well on the various App Stores. The better an app performs at granting the desired instant gratification, the more likely users will treat it as their Go-To solution. It explains a lot when you consider that desktops in general don’t have “apps” and tablets can’t fit in your pocket (ignoring that some phones have a hard time fitting into the average pocket). To their credit, Microsoft does have apps on their Windows 8 and 10 desktops, but the app store has yet to mature and present developers with an enticing potential marketplace.

Future Tense

As you can well imagine, with PC sales dropping like a stone and smartphone and tablet sales soaring, systems producers are scrambling to figure out what the consumer is going to want in the next two to five years, and it’s hard to imagine where that might go. I thought I’d have a think on it and see if I can’t use the old Predict-O-Tron to suss out a few things. First, however, let’s remind ourselves about the categories we’re looking at:

• Mobile phones (i.e., Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and other mobile OS)
• Ultraportable devices (i.e., iOS & Android tablets, ChromeBooks)
• Portable devices (i.e., PC & Mac tablets, laptops, 2-in-1s, convertibles)
• Micro systems (i.e., PC sticks, Intel NUC, & other tiny non-portables)
• Desktop systems (i.e., small form factor, mini tower, tower, and All-in-one systems)
• Gaming systems (i.e., Microsoft’s Xbox One, Sony’s PlayStation 4, Nintendo’s Wii U)
• Smart systems (i.e., home media, TVs, and DVD/BR players)

With that in mind, let’s dig into what might happen by 2020:

• The Phablet – I don’t think phone sizes are going to increase much from here on out. There’s little incentive for consumers to have a seven or eight inch phone they can’t fit into their pockets. 5-5.5″ devices are going to inhabit the sweet spot in this market, while smaller devices will continue to fill the needs of the budget market. As always, there will be outliers, but they will be few and, unless extremely crafty, won’t last long. Advances will continue in hardware and software development. We’ll likely see better cameras, some interesting iterations of curved displays, and desktop-style docking as Microsoft revealed with its new Lumia 950 and 950XL. I have a feeling that we might see some edge-less displays in the next few years, which would allow the introduction of a workable folding device.
• The CPU – Not many people but hardcore nerds talk about CPUs all that much, but they are critical to computing. Clock speeds won’t likely get any higher. They’ve been in stasis for a number of years already. What has grown are the number of cores, the efficiency of manufacturing, and the ability to reduce the amount of heat produced. One key example is Intel’s Atom line. When they first appeared, they were anemic and slow. The current crop is fast, capable, and efficient. As such, we will continue to see advances in multi-core parts, further reductions in heat production and power consumption, and increased functionality to handle complex operations and multi-tasking.
• Desktop systems – Due to the continued miniaturization of computer tech, we will witness the ongoing death of the general purpose desktop. The “box” remains a staple in enterprise deployments, but even that’s being eaten away by the laptop. The consumer market is already being euthanized with tablets and will likely be replaced by the selection of small form factor and tiny desktop systems like Intel’s NUC series and an increasing number of all-in-one systems similar to Apple’s iMac. I have a feeling these won’t catch fire, but they will maintain at least some level of presence in the market.
• The Laptop – If anything has been an effective agent of chaos against the forces of the desktop, it’s the laptop. Long gone are the days when a laptop was three or more times more costly than a desktop PC, and with the growing performance of low cost CPU parts, the multi-component relic of the PC just isn’t appetizing to many consumers. Yet, since the introduction of the iPad, Apple’s ultimate disruptor, the laptop has been facing it’s own foe, and fought back hard. The disastrous “netbook” era was short lived and ill conceived as a possible combatant to the tablet, so more tablets were released.
  The most compelling change in the laptop battle, however, is convergence. In other words, if you can’t beat them, join them, or, if you’re the Borg, assimilate them. Asus’ popular Transformer line of 2-in-1 devices is testament to that, but it’s Microsoft’s surprise rollout of the gorgeous and amazing Surface Book that is likely going to act as a template for the future of the laptop. By simply removing the display, you get a tablet PC. Reattaching the display, you get a full on laptop with longer battery life and even gaming-grade discrete graphics as an option. I predict that various forms of this configuration will become popular. There is, however, the matter of systems interconnect. After all, nobody will want a tablet that weighs five pounds, even if it sports a Core i7 and 32GBs of RAM. We may see some very interesting innovations in this particular space.
• All The Others – There’s not much more to say, really. Gaming systems are going to get more game-ier. It’s unlikely that Sony or Microsoft will diverge from their course. Both command very lucrative markets and both see only each other as their nemesis. Nintendo, on the other hand, literally owns the mobile, dedicated gaming market, but still have to wage war against the monster that is smartphone gaming. I’d bet my shirt that Nintendo knows they need to emphasize that some games are just better with physical controls and will offer some spin on that when codename “NX” is revealed sometime next year. They’ve finally figured out they need to release some games on iOS and Android, but to really thrive they need to continue to innovate.
  Smart devices are going to get smart-ier. It’s not clear what will happen in the smart device vs. smart add-on war. Smart TVs lock you into that manufacturers ecosystem, while add-on devices like the Roku offer a much wider range of options. It will be interesting to see if anyone develops a line of TVs that have a low-cost, interchangeable dock in the foot that allows the attachment of an Apple TV or Roku 4 box and just bypass “smart” altogether. That’d be smart, if you’ll pardon the pun. If anything takes off in consumer electronics, though, I think it will be better, open, touch-and-pair wireless display technology using a combination of NFC and Wifi. The stupid dongle thing is a nuisance and restrictive.

In general, much of what is likely to come in the next five years won’t be astonishing, but iterative, an evolution, if you will, and much of it will allow access to the internet in some form. I can’t predict major breakthroughs that we’ll need to move beyond where we are now, but there’s still plenty of room in the tech that we have to continue development. For example, if the Surface Book were to really spawn a PC replacement market, it would need to have enough functionality to operate as a tablet without the base, but still be able to offer real power when docked. That’s going to require some real innovations in board-level interconnectivity as well as license allowances for dual CPU systems in the consumer market.

I also expect we’ll see some new takes on the docked smartphone tablet in the next few years. If you look at how Microsoft uses a tiny little dock to turn their Lumia 950 and Lumia 950XL into a desktop analog, you can easily imagine that functionality being integrated into tablet and laptop forms. It’s just dead until you slide in your phone. This is nothing new. The Palm Foleo was one of the more beautiful implementations of this concept, but it was cancelled before it was released. There was going to be a Foleo 2, but that never took form as Palm was falling apart, was bought by HP, and then unceremoniously shut down. More recently, the Motorola Atrix 4G and the optional laptop dock was actually available, but Incipio’s Clambook never really materialized. About the only place you can get such functionality is BlackBerry’s elegant Blend for OS 10.3, Windows and Mac OS X desktop software that lets you work on your BlackBerry via your system’s keyboard and mouse, even without a direct internet connection.

Whatever happens, though, it promises to be interesting. After all, we’ve seen Apple copying from others instead of defining the market and Microsoft come from being an oldster with stars in it’s eyes about the Good Old Days to being one of the hottest shops for real innovation in just the last few years. It’s going to be a real hoot to see what comes down the pike next to thrill and entice us.

For the past few weeks, Forbes.com has been forcing visitors to disable ad blockers if they want to read its content. Visitors to the site with Adblock or uBlock enabled are told they must disable it if they wish to see any Forbes content. Thanks to Forbes’ interstitial ad and quote of the day, Google caching doesn’t capture data properly, either.

What sets Forbes apart, in this case, is that it didn’t just force visitors to disable ad blocking — it actively served them malware as soon as they did. Details were captured by security researcher Brian Baskin, who screenshotted the process:

And now back to the original piece…

One of the things I loved about the internet in the 2000’s is that it was an overflowing treasure trove of content. Following in the footsteps of AltaVista and Yahoo!, Google had made the internet accessible. PHP, Java, and Ajax were coming on strong and reforging plain HTML to make the internet usable. Creative types and entrepreneurs were developing new ways to leverage the internet. Sure, there were ugly things like HoTMaiL, GeoCities, and MySpace, but we also got YouTube, Amazon, WikiPedia, CraigsList. GMail showed up, Facebook took its early steps, and Twitter popped up out of nowhere.

There were also a lot of ads. Corporate Earth had found the internet to be a new resource to exploit, and exploit it did. This was the era of the internet that created the need for the pop-up blocker feature being added to just about every browser on the planet. New advances in web tech also created news ways for site developers to be more efficient and more expressive. This created the Flash revolution and early Javascript-based pop-ups. Both website owners and ad network owners were having conniptions over click rates and revenues, and web users were getting really sick of ads splashed into every corner.

Hell, they still are.

Yet Google built their entire empire, one of the largest companies on Earth, almost entirely on the simple concept of plain text ads that didn’t stand out like a sore thumb, but few others followed that lead. From this incomplete history, admittedly lacking nuance, we know today that advertising on websites is deeply annoying. We have interstitials, ads which pop up between stories on some websites or when you jump from one site to another to keep you from reading before you look at the sponsor’s message. We have all manner of Javascript-based pop-ups that appear when you scroll down far enough, try to click the Close Tab control, or flip up to ask you to complete a survey telling them how much you loathe their website because of the ads. Even I use them to hawk my book or get you to follow me on Twitter.

DISCLOSURE: I employ Google’s AdSense on my site and a few others and, get this, I earn a whopping $30 a month. It pays a few internet-related bills. whee.

Then there’s the “Despicable”-class items. These are more behaviors than actual ads. The most common one people come to know and despise is Link Bait, links with titles shrouded in mystery, dropping just enough bombshell to get you to click. Then, of course, the resulting page is saturated in ads. One of the even more painful forms of this is the “Amazing List”-class. Here’s a simple tutorial; think up something gross or sexual, find five or more celebrities who have possibly admitted to doing it, create a gallery of these entries with one entry per page, entitle it something like “7 Celebrity Men Who Have Worn Women’s Panties”, now advertise. Guess what! Schlubs have to load that many pages, each full of ads, just to get through the list. Hideous.

Enter the Ad Blocker. Ad blockers promise one thing; to block ads from appearing in your browser. The results are simply astounding, if you use the right one. I personally use AdBlock, a plugin for Chrome on Windows, which effectively blocks all ads I don’t want to see, but allows advertisers who behave responsibly to display their tasteful ads. AdBlock is one of the most popular because it works well. In fact, it works so well, the internet advertising industry and sites that derive revenue from ads instead of subscriptions is engaging in collective howls of “foul” claiming that it works too well and too many people are using it. They’re simply loosing too much money and they’ll have to stop publishing if we don’t let them violate our eyeballs with their ads (or the ears of our deaf friends who must endure hideously convoluted crap in their screen readers).

It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that now it’s difficult to go to just about any website without seeing some pop-up (am I the only one seeing the irony here?) begging visitors to please whitelist their site so they can continue to exist. Some truly heinous asshats will just block the content altogether until you disable your ad blocker. If that wasn’t bad enough, ads are just about everywhere. They’re in our Free-To-Play games, which should really be called Free-To-Play-But-Costs-Money-To-Play-Well games. They flash brightly on giant electronic signs in our cities, blinding us while we drive at 80 MPH on the freeway. They invade our shows on Hulu, even when we pay a subscription fee (that’s changed lately, but it illustrates the point). We’ve been fed pre-movie ads in the form of trailers for so many decades, we now look forward to them! Billions of revenue dollars flow from one corporate entity to the next because of ads, but ad blockers have been putting a dent in that, at least on the internet.

Well, so what!

Who cares if you obnoxious ad people and website operators complain that not every human being on Earth is actively enthralled by your short-form, advert-oriented expositions of so-called creativity. You are hawking stuff and not everybody wants to look at gaudy promotional material every waking minute of every day so you can make a few more millions, shocking though that may be. If your damned ads weren’t so freakishly annoying and obtrusive, we probably wouldn’t be blocking them! They slow down page loading times. They require plugins people don’t want or need and likely shouldn’t be using because they open security holes on their systems. Ad networks have even been a source of viral attacks on millions of unsuspecting people who never once thought they may get a virus from their respectable website.

In a nutshell, you are exploiting us and we don’t like it. We now have the power to stop it on the internet, and that bothers you. When Replay TV and TiVo first came out, they had the ability to skip ads. Where’s Replay TV now? Dead. Where’s TiVo? They had to cripple the function to survive, but have recently announced their new console that brings back Replay TV’s long coveted 30-second jump, thumbing their noses that their oppressors. Millions of people are cutting the cord, ditching cable TV, and getting subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu’s new ad-free program, and just getting TV the old fashioned way, through an antenna. YouTube even has an ad-free service for $10 a month.

Nobody loves your ads because you abuse it and there are some people who will take that abuse to the extreme. So, here’s the breakdown. You stop horribly exploiting us users and we’ll stop blocking your entirely reasonable, unobtrusively placed ads and you can go on making revenue.

Better yet, why not try charging a super-small monthly fee to go ad-free, and no, you don’t get to spam those who don’t pay. Just consider asking for a few bucks a month. This is the internet, after all. You can reach millions of people instead of a few thousand in a neighborhood. You can make real money. It’s not that hard.

Look at Google.