Tag Archives: Devices

I think I just had my first encounter with web push notifications and I HATE IT

What. The. F&#*.

I’ve just spent the past few minutes looking at several restaurants’ pages on OpenTable — because the restaurant company is one of my clients and I’m in the process of updating OpenTable links on their websites.

Each time I kept one of their OpenTable pages open for a minute or so, on my Mac, I would get a “Time Sensitive” notification pop-up on my iPad and my Apple Watch. I realized after the second or third time that some system had determined that it was time for me to leave if I was going to get to the restaurant in time for the reservation I hadn’t even made.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING.

I would get it if I was heavily into the OpenTable “ecosystem,” but I don’t even have their app installed on any of my devices. I’m guessing it’s this new web push notifications thing. But… GAAAH!! I’m not even logged into OpenTable in my browser on any of these devices, or on my computer. Somehow Safari itself must be pushing these notifications to my devices.

DO NOT WANT.

Gruber thinks Apple is doing this to comply with increased regulatory scrutiny in the E.U. If that’s the case, it just once again proves that the only times governments seem to get involved in the dealings of tech companies is to make things worse, mainly because the people in government making these decisions don’t understand what the problem is, and they understand even less how to fix it. And don’t get me wrong, I am not some kind of techno-libertarian. I think tech companies do a lot of bad things that the government needs to regulate. But the people in government trying to do that just don’t get it.

I can tell you one thing. I absolutely do not want any website I visit, ever, to be able to send push notifications to my f&#*ing devices. Stop. Just stop.

Damn Cords!

I love technology. Someone could call me a technophile and I would accept it as a compliment. But despite my love for all varieties of electronic gadgetry, you may be surprised to discover that I hate cords! In fact, I DESPISE them. They are always getting in the way, they always get tangled together, and if you leave a cord to its own devices (ha ha), it will, I guarantee, find a way to tie itself in a knot.

Not just any ordinary kind of knot, mind you, but a knot of such terrible complexity as to make the Gordian knot unravel itself in fear of a competing knot of such incomprehensible madness.

Solutions are on the way. The technology Apple markets as “AirPort” (and Apple’s name for it is all I care about) promises wireless networking anywhere in the home, and the new “Bluetooth” technology promises to allow us one day soon to connect peripheral devices to a computer merely by placing them in its vicinity.

That’s all well and good, but at the moment I still sit at my desk nervously, wondering if today is the day that the mad cord monster will animate and eat my legs. Today I still have several hundred feet worth of Cat-5 Ethernet cable strung all around my house, tucked into corners as neatly as it will tolerate, aggressively making its presence known in my living room, bedroom and basement.

DO YOU HEAR ME, CORDOSAURUS?! YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED!!!