Matthew Supert

Why is it whenever you find a product or service you really like, it seems to fall apart? If you haven't been following the news this past week, Evernote has announced changes to their privacy policy that take effect January 23rd. The internet has been pretty upset with these changes because the new policy explicitly states that Evernote engineers could be allowed access to view your data for various reasons ranging from law enforcement requirements to them just trying to improve their service. 

Now, perhaps Evernote has been doing this for a long time and they are just now clarifying their practice. What is unfortunate though is that Evernote has now established a trust problem with its users. Evernote has been the better part of the past five years migrating their platform from a note taking application to a business collaboration platform. With that migration has come a rather hefty annual fee. The business account is $120 a year. I paid for that account because I liked Evernote and I prefer to pay for my services whenever I can. The problem though is that when you pay for a product or service you expect certain things in return. If Google or Facebook were to come along and state that their engineers were going to look at my data for their own uses I would be annoyed, but their services are free and they make money off of leveraging my data. 

Evernote is not that service. I am a paid user and when the service costs as much as it does I expect my data to be fully secure. They have courted businesses and it is not unreasonable to expect some of those businesses to now have confidential or proprietary information store in their Evernote accounts. Having any sort of direct access by any personnel at Evernote is just not acceptable. I would even expect these days that my entire Evernote database can be fully encrypted so no one at Evernote can ever access it. 

Not everyone may share my point of view, but I think it would be in Evernote's best interest to encrypt the data so even if law enforcement does come knocking with a warrant, they can simply say "We don't even have access to the data". 

Evernote's CEO posted a clarifying statement this morning, which I don't feel has clarified much. In the end I feel that Evernote's fundamental and core initiatives no longer match my own and what I want to get out of the service. It makes me extremely disappointed. 

I have been an Evernote user for more than five years now. I have everything from my grocery lists to tax information to my creative writing stored in there. They have continued to show that they are losing their way though. They have increased the prices of their service while not implementing features that have progressed the platform. Basic things such as a night mode for their applications, distraction free writing or even archiving of data just doesn't exist. When you have thousands of notes like I do then searching can become cumbersome. 

Just a few months ago I finally found a great writing application that uses Evernote called Alternote. That app is great, but now I feel like I can't really use it. 

So where does that leave me? At this point I am not sure if I can really stay with Evernote unless they come out and really change the course of their ship. Evernote's business account was nice because my business note and personal notes were kept completely separate. I feel like I will now have to bring my business notes over to Onenote. 

The question is where do I end up with my personal notes and writing? Right now I don't know. Apple's Notes app actually looks pretty robust and being an Apple users I think I can be fine living in that platform. That would solve all of my basic note taking needs. What it won't do is get me where I need to be for my writing. I want to have that minimal writing platform with a night mode. 

I may give Ulysses another look, something I was testing a few months ago. Another candidate though looks to be Bear. It is a really clean note taking interface and with a $15 a year subscription it seems affordable. Time will tell though as I begin to test stuff out over the next week. 

You won't often see me get onto a soapbox on my blog here, but with the whole political atmosphere as of late I have seen too many posts on social media and elsewhere from people who have taken a few words from a political philosophy, put it onto a meme and then expanded that to encapsulate and summarize what an entire political theory is. That sort of stuff annoys me to no end. If one wants to disagree with a political ideology they should take the time to try and understand what that theory is, where it came from and why it's ideals came to be where they are. 

My undergraduate degree was political theory, and while that seems like a sort of useless degree to have in a practical world, I feel like being exposed and reading the works of political theorists has made me an extremely well rounded person and one who can empathize with various points of view. These political theories, philosophies, and movements were born out of a need. They didn't just spring up out of nowhere so there is always at least some degree of legitimacy to what they are trying to convey. Some, in fact many have not stood the test of time, while others ebb and flow in their prominence around the world depending upon various political and socio-economic conditions in the world. While none of them are the Truth, all of them hold some bit of truth and reasoning for why individuals and societies believe what they may believe. 

So with that in mind, I am going to outline a couple of the works that I have found to be the most influential upon me. Hopefully, you will read some of these yourselves. And please, in the future, don't just Google something and take the first sentence or two of Wikipedia and use that as your education on a topic. All of the books here also have volumes of work worth of discussion and critique upon them so I won't go and try to summarize in detail what they are about. Instead I'll try to mention the main topic from each book that is typically drawn out and discussed in conversations.  

Most of the books I will recommend are probably in the public domain, so I will try to link to their ebook and if it is available the audiobook. 

Finally, before I get into my list I want to point everyone to another resource which i feel is way more useful than Wikipedia for a lot of these topics. The Internet Encyclopedia or Philosophy, is a great place to go if you need to get your summarized version for some of these books. Most of these are going to be hard to read so some sort of companion is truly helpful. 

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I was browsing around my blog today and noticed down at the bottom of the page that I had 45 pages of archives. I decided to click on the last link to see what my very first blog post was. My very first blog post was on October 9th, 2004. You can see it below. 

Now, I obviously wasn't using Posthaven back then and it appears that I had setup a custom html website with an RSS feed at the time. To be honest, I don't remember exactly what that was. Clearly though through the beauty of RSS I have been able to export and carry my past blog posts to the various platforms that I have used over the years. I have at one point or another used nearly every blog platform out there. For years Blogspot.com was my go to choice for blogging in the mid-2000's. The interface was clean and with the ownership of Google you got good search results. That annoying blogspot bar got to me over time and I then migrated to other platforms. At some point I was using Wordpress and while I liked the platform, it did eventually change from a blogging tool into a full on CMS, which became a bit overkill for my needs. Tumblr and Posterous were also great sites that I experimented with and there were probably more. 

In the end I have found myself now residing on Posthaven.com, which is a decent place to blog. It is a bare bones blogging system with a minimalist interface, but that is largely what I am looking for from my blogging system. I have always preferred to go with a paid hosting site if I can so I don't have to deal with ads and can have my own URL. Posthaven has grown a bit stagnant over the past few years though so there may come a time if I find the need to move onto another service to try. 

In the meantime though I thought it would be interesting to post a couple of my favorite old blog posts. Going through these brings back some interesting memories, and while the migrations from service to service to service hasn't preserved every post, many of them are at least still readable. 

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I put together this little (and it is tiny) metal model kit yesterday. Some of you may have seen these before at B&N or other stores. They are great little model kits made of metal from a company called Fascinations.com. The kits require no glue to put together. Some of the pieces are insanely small but I think just about anyone from 10+ can put one of these together. They are amazingly well designed and very intricate. 

It took me about two and a half hours to assemble this kit. Needle nose pliers are a must and the narrower the tip the better. I would also recommend a pair of wire cutters and if you have it a thimble. 

This was a blast to make and I hope to get a couple more of these in the future. The final product is only about 2" in all directions. 

It was a beautiful day on Saturday and Megan suggested we get out of the house. One of the things I wanted to do this summer was to get our bikes into the city and bike around for lunch, so we ended up doing that. 

We took our bikes in and parked at a Park District parking lot next to La Rabida Children's hospital. The goal was to bike our way along the lake front trail north into the city. 

The problems though started immediately upon our arrival. Megan's bike had a flat tire on the rear wheel and we didn't have a spare with us. "No big deal", I though. We are in the city so there are bike shops every few blocks. I pulled out my phone and went off to find the nearest shop. My first stop was at the "Bike Clinic" which was just south of where we were. Unfortunately they were closed. There was a sign on their door written in Sharpie that they would not open until 1:00pm. Well off I went to the next stop on my Google search, which was Blackstone Bicycle Works. Getting there was not an easy task. Streets seemed to be closed all over the place and I was constantly re-routed try to find my way there. At one point I got stuck down a one way street that had a barrier curb erected in the middle of it. I had to back out of the street back onto the main road. 

I finally found my way to Blackstone, but at first I was not sure if I was at the right place. As I walked up all I saw were a few dozen bikes sitting outside what looked to be an abandoned building. A few moments later though someone came out to greet me and they took me round back to the main shop where I bought our tubes. Turned out the place was pretty cool and is a youth mentoring type of facility. 

Well, we finally got Megan's bike fixed and we were off and running and we soon made our first stop after that.

Hyde Park Records

Hyde Park Records was our first stop. It was a very "hole in the wall" sort of record store. They had a lot of rock and soul music, but not much else. I personally was in the mood to find some jazz or classical. Megan made a great find while going through their bins with

Reckless Records 

The Slurping Turtle

Not a record store, but our pit-stop for lunch we wanted to have Ramen and we hit up the Slurping Turtle which is north across the river. I had a basic Ramen Bowl and Megan ordered a sort of ramen cold salad, which was pretty good for such a hot day. 

Jazz Record Mart

Our final stop was at the Jazz Mart which is located near Illinois and State Street. If you are into jazz music this store is really cool. Almost entirely jazz it has a completely a different vibe than the other two stores. They have a nice selection of world music as well so if you want to go bin diving, I would highly recommend this place. 

Winter at work is always our slow time and it is a nice opportunity to us to catch up on smaller projects and plan things for the year. Spring is what brings in our busy time of the year and this year it has hit us suddenly like a brick. Things have been crazy busy and stressful. I have really found two outlets over the past couple of weeks to really burn off some steam. 

I have had a really energizing experience broadcasting some of my music in the studio on Twitch. I am now to the point where I am experimenting with two cameras and perhaps will expand to even three cameras. I hope over the coming weeks with this setup to do a couple of "live performance shows" or to do some tutorials for the Command Station and my other gear. 

Megan and I had a great time heading to the Chicago Auto-Show yesterday. It has been several years since we last attended and it is always a fun thing to go see. The show is always huge and the crowds are always insane. We were exhausted by the end of the day, but it was ultimately fun to see some of the cars on the show floor. 

I have always enjoyed looking at the concept cars that these companies put out. I was surprised that there didn't appear to really be than many concept vehicles. Overall though there are some nice cars and it puts some things into perspective for a future car purchase that may be coming down the pipeline in the next 12-16 months. 

I consider myself to be a fairly handy individual. I'm not going to go and build a canoe or tear down an entire car engine, but I think most house projects I can handle. Last week my dad came over to help me install a new floor in my house. Now my dad is certainly a few steps up from me. All my life growing up I always remember him tackling all sorts of house projects. He is one of those old fashioned, flannel shirt wearing sorts of dad's and he is always eager to help me with projects when they come up. 

You would think that installing pre-finished, hardware laminate floor would be a fairly easy task to do. It ended up being a significantly larger project than I fully anticipated. What I thought would be a two day weekend project has now turned into a three weekend project after the staining and cutting and all of the craziness. I don't know how my dad does it. I was just completely exhausted at the end of each day and my patience was completely shot after this project, and this was just the foyer in my house. I still have on the horizon to do my mudroom and then ultimately my kitchen. 

This is going to end up being three projects that will be ongoing for the next several months at least. 

Last week we were having a conversation at work about the "heaviest" movies we have seen. These are the sort of movies that I felt were emotionally draining. Perhaps they were movies that were fantastic or perhaps they were mediocre, but you just don't ever want to see them again because they leave you emotionally exhausted. You walk out of a matinee on a sunny afternoon and you can't help but feeling depressed. Warning, there may be spoilers here. 

1. District 9

District 9 is the movie I immediately think of whenever we talk about a movie like this. I was left just completely exhausted and depressed at the end of this movie. It's whole critique on apartheid really hits home with the portrayal of the aliens and the shear brutality upon the refugees and the camp really hit home for me. I had never seen a movie portray the sadness and hopelessness quite like District 9. 

2. We Were Soldiers

It is probably impossible to create a list like this and not include a Vietnam movie in here. There are several excellent and striking Vietnam movies out there, and I wouldn't classify this as the "best" Vietnam movie, but this is the one that stuck with me the most. The cinematography work on the ground really showcased the mayhem that was all around the U.S. soldiers and their landing zone. Watching Mel Gibson's character breaking down and crying at the end was the pivotal, emotional upheaval that put this movie over the top. As a viewer you really get a sense of the weight that his character bears with all of the soldiers who served and died under him. 

3. American Beauty

I chose American Beauty because of the solemnness it leaves you with at the end. This film doesn't quite have the sadness, that some of the others due, despite the tragic ending. Instead it almost felt like a "release" of sorts. Almost as if our main character finally got out of the mundane world. 

4. The Green Mile

If there is going to be a straight up tear jerker in this list, it has to be "The Green Mile". Michael Clarke Duncan puts on an amazing performance playing a death row inmate who I think personifies a sort of messiah type character. The relationships that are developed between his character and all of the guards during the film really turn the final execution scene into a very personal and heart wrenching final moments. 

5. Hotel Rwanda

A movie you have to watch once but don't ever want to watch again. What makes this movie so impactful is knowing that it all actually happened. The defining scene that is etched into my mind is when Don Cheadle's character has to drive down a road strewn with dead bodies. He is forced to drive over those bodies and the movie shows the physical and emotional impact of each bump in the truck as he has to drive over those bodies. 

This past Saturday Megan and I had the opportunity to go out and see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall downtown. I never had the opportunity to go see the CSO before. They performed Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 1. Both were quite fantastic. There really is something special about seeing a performance like that live. And more, the Symphony Hall is such an intimate performance center. Our seats had us dead center on the main floor and we couldn't have been more than forty feet away from the Orchestra. 

It was also a wonderful opportunity to get dressed up, which many people don't do too often anymore. Megan received two compliments on her dress within minutes of sitting down for dinner. Speaking of dinner, we ate at Tesori which is located in the symphony building. A nice restaurant that isn't too fancy or expensive. Excellent drinks too. 

We had a fantastic time at the symphony and in short we need to make it a regular thing. It was way too fun.