ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In MobileViews 623, recorded on August 23, 2026, Jon Westfall and I reunited after a brief summer hiatus. I congratulated Jon on his official promotion to full professor!
The main discussion was my observations and rants dealing with the effects (1st world problems) of Hurricane Lala, which was downgraded to a tropical storm as it passed south of Oahu. While our immediate neighborhood was spared major damage, we experienced an annoying 45.5-hour power outage that instantly killed our wired broadband and degraded local cellular towers. Prior to the storm, I successfully experimented with Google Spark to aggregate emergency updates, but once offline, my only communication lifeline was Apple’s satellite messaging service to stay in touch with Jon and my daughter. While the service worked brilliantly, Jon and I strongly criticized Apple's UI design for hiding the satellite settings until a crisis occurs, which prevents users from familiarizing themselves with the interface beforehand.
My experience with utilities recovery highlighted a massive gap in customer service "situational awareness". I spent days dealing with AT&T and Spectrum customer service representatives who claimed our services were fully active when hundreds of households in our neighborhood were entirely offline. Jon and I agreed that this is a prime use case for AI coordination. Spectrum, in particular, could have resolved problems if it had what I call an Omniscient AI Analyst monitoring incoming service calls and comparing it to declared operational status. In this case, after one of my neighbors was able to escalate a call to a tier 1 technician, it appears that a service call about a mile away had restore service to at least one customer resulting in the entire region being listed fully online. This resulted in a truck roll late at night (kudos to Spectrum for this) that restored service to our area in a few hours.
Related to this AI Analyst concept, Jon recently tested ChatGPT's Codex as a virtual systems administrator on a VPS, finding it incredibly diligent at running backups, simulating disaster recoveries, and analyzing server logs. When traditional digital networks failed us, our most reliable source of hyper-local road conditions and safety information turned out to be our neighborhood postal worker, proving that low-tech human networks still trump broken infrastructure during emergencies.
We finished up the episode with a look at new hardware and physical ergonomics. Jon evaluated the Clicks physical keyboard for the iPhone, praising its build quality but admitting his thumb-typing speed has naturally declined in favor of on-screen typing over the last 15 years. I shared who I made an uncomfortable "ergonomic" split keyboard actually comfortable, I bought inexpensive plastic "laptop feet" to give the keyboard a 15-degree lift on its rear side, and I’m eagerly awaiting a bioluminescent keyboard skin to make the low-contrast keys of my MacBook Neo visible in dim light.
Our thoughts go out to those on the Big Island and other areas who suffered severe losses and who are still dealing with power and water outages a week after the storm. We hope to have our friend Sven Johannsen back on the show next week to talk about his latest hardware purchases.
