View from the Mountain

The Moose Camp on the Newfoundland Barrens

Back in the fall of 1973, at the age of 24, I was in my second year living in an old farmhouse in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia along the Bay of Fundy.  It was nearly 1,300 miles to the home where I grew up in Mount Airy, North Carolina.

Today technology seems to be everywhere.  Smartphones, smartwatches , and laptop computers that find out anything given a good Internet connection. Back in the seventies, there were no cellphones, no Internet, and certainly no laptops, iPads, or portable Garmin GPS devices to guide you.The only technology we had was compass which we used with detailed topographic maps. Reading maps and using a compass were skills I mastered in Boy Scouts and honed while working on my pilot’s license.

Beyond technology we had faith in our abilities and the people we trusted with our lives.  Perhaps it makes the adventures a little more exciting to recall because there were no safety nets and we were over 1,800 miles from friends and family.My new wife, Glenda, also from Mount Airy, and I were looking for a new place to farm.  I had been thinking about homesteading in Newfoundland.  Back before the Internet, research required actually visiting places. Since the place the department of agriculture recommended that I check out was a remote valley, the only way to get there was by bush plane.

I really needed to get on the ground and feel the soil not just fly over a frozen landscape like I had already done before I married Glenda.In preparation for potentially living in the bush, I had already passed the written test for a pilot’s license and completed my solo flight. I had also flown into the Alaskan bush a few years earlier. While the Newfoundland bush plane flight was a first for Glenda, she handled it well in spite the challenges of trying to land in a windswept box canyon. Strong crosswinds eventually forced us to give up trying to land down in the valley. Plan B was quickly hatched, and we landed on a small pond up on the barrens.

There was a moose camp (pictured above) on the pond but that was the closest thing to civilization for twenty miles on one side and over three hundred miles on the other. There is a good reason the mountains of Newfoundland are called barrens, but the terrain is not nearly as even as it looks. However, we were young and foolish so we bravely stepped off of the float plane onto the dock which was covered with moose and caribou parts, partially wrapped for a trip home.

We were soon met by a number of angry American moose hunters who were suffering from a severe hangover after celebrating the previous evening with some ladies of the evening who had been flown in for the occasion.  They were convinced we had come to steal their hard-earned moose carcasses.  I managed to convince them that we were just recent college students and the only thing that we had which would shoot was a camera.  They relented and allowed us off the dock and into the wilderness. 

We had agreed to rendezvous with the float plane in four days. We headed off into the barrens with our packs on our backs. I had assured Glenda that we would find plenty of wood in the river valley.  Unfortunately we were now in the barrens, and I would soon be regretting that I had ignored Glenda’s unrelenting advice to bring a gas stove. I am still hearing about that mistake. Our three-mile hike across the barrens to  the edge of the valley  we hoped to see was both arduous and long.  While the barrens look level, that is deceptive.  The vegetation covering the boulders and rocky soil grows to a height that makes things seem level. But when walking through it, the ground is uneven and often disappears between the hidden rocks.

After a few hours of hiking we made camp on the edge of the valley in a cleared area.  It was the flattest area that we could find, but it was also marshy.  It did not take me long to realize that I made a huge mistake by not bringing a stove.  There was no wood on the barrens.  Of course we had not planned to be on the barrens.  If things had worked out like we hoped, we would have been camping in a valley of trees.  As it was, we were high on the barrens, and there was no wood beyond blueberry bushes. We spent three nights in our mountain tent in rain that was barely above freezing.  With no stove, we survived on Ez-Cheese (Cheese-Whiz) and some snacks.

On the third morning, we decided that we needed to start making our way back to the small pond by the moose camp where we were to meet with the float plane that would hopefully take us back to civilization. Glenda had almost given up hope of seeing civilization again.  She had shed a lot of tears in the three days, but I was confident we would make it back to Corner Brook.  The day we decided to break camp and leave was about as foggy a day as one might imagine finding in the mists of Newfoundland.  Landmarks were barely visible, but fortunately I had gotten us to our camp on the edge of the valley using a topographic map and taking compass readings frequently and recording them on the map.  We actually had far less trouble than we expected getting back to within sight of the moose camp on the pond.

We worried about what kind of reception we might receive there, but it turned out that all the drunken hunters were long gone.  The only inhabitants left were a couple of university professors who were moonlighting as guides.  They invited us for lunch of caribou chops and moose tongue. They were waiting for their float plane to pick them up.  As lunch was cooking they heard the Beaver float plane that was to take them home.  They did not even bother turning the stove off or removing the almost done food.  They grabbed their gear and ran.  Over their shoulders they told us to enjoy the camp and turn the oil off when we left.

It was nice to spend the night in a place with some beds and where you could stand up. Glenda did not seem to mind the walls decorated with Playboy playmates.  Anything was better than the mountain tent. The next morning, we awoke to clouds and not a very nice day for a ride in a small float plane.  Being in the bush waiting for a ride back to civilization was a little different. in the seventies. There was no way to communicate, and we just had to trust that our pilot would come and retrieve us instead of selling our LandCruiser and leaving us to hike out or struggle through a long Newfoundland winter. The daylight hours of our proposed pick-up day moved slowly.  There was not even a hint of airplane engine. Thoughts of being stuck 20 miles from the nearest road quickly ran through my mind, but I held onto to the belief that we would be retrieved.  Late in the day just as the light was starting to dwindle, our Cessna 185 on floats winged its way between threatening clouds and the rocky barrens to make a landing on the small lake.

Success Working from Home

I have been working from home for most of my adult life.  Lots of people joke about how you can goof off while working from home. Fortunately, I have worked in enough offices to know that the biggest goof-offs usually show up at the office every day and leave without ever accomplishing anything. 

Being successful is not defined by your work environment, it is in your hands.

Even before the coronavirus, there were plenty of benefits that might accrue to you if you work from home. However, many of them are closely intertwined with having the right office, good equipment, and the temperament to work from a home office.

For over ten years, we had a cattle farm and while I had a home office for a couple of weeks out of the year during tax season, most of my time was spent on a tractor.  In 1981, we dispersed our cattle, and I got my first home office job.  It is good that I waited until then because it was nearly impossible to do the job without a computer and Apple II+s like I bought were just starting to land on desktops. That job only lasted six months but it led to my first go-to-the-office-every-day job, selling Apple computers and managing the salespeople in five distinct offices.

After two years of that, I landed at Apple and my career of being in the office occasionally while mostly working from home began in earnest. In the next twenty years, I rapidly moved up to the corporate ladder and eventually became director of federal sales. Even then I was rarely in the office more than half the workdays of a month.  I actually credit my home office as one of the reasons that I managed to last nearly twenty years at Apple. Sometimes having some geographic separation from upper management is a good thing.

Technology evolving from email on a mainframe to email on your phone and every other imaginable device has made working from home much easier over the years. Here is a list of what has helped me be successful.

1. Having a dedicated, private physical space has been an unwavering success factor for me. You cannot do great work until you are in a space where you can concentrate.
2. Developing the technical skills to support yourself in your company's specific environment is really important.  You are not going to thrive if you are always calling someone for help.
3. Using the right equipment to match your needs and the requirements of your company is essential.
4. Creating a routine that matches the needs of your company can actually help you do better than office-bound personnel.
5. Communicating frequently and often with others in and outside your company is a lifeline to sanity and success.

At times the right equipment can be daunting.  When I started managing an Apple higher education team in 1993, my office had three phone lines, one for talking, one for a data connection and another for someone calling in when I was on the other line. Creating a network in the early days was no picnic and there was no cloud for storage or collaboration.

Today, Slack, one phone line, and a reasonable Internet connection handle my communications needs. It would be even better if I had a fiber connection with symmetric up and down speed for better video conferencing.

I have found that having multiple computers is a benefit. Because I can get pulled in different directions, I like just being able to swing my chair around to another task. My desks have two Macs, one Windows 10 machine, and one Linux box.  I have my own NAS, three printers, and a scanner. I did my own Ethernet cabling when we built this addition where my new office is but most people might be fine with wireless. My office uses wired Ethernet. I wouldn't have it any other way. My own personal computer is a Google Pixelbook which almost never comes to my office. Keeping personal and work computers separate also helps. 

I keep slightly offset hours compared to our CEO. That means when he is at lunch, I can work on materials that need to be finished with a joint effort later in the day.

Being successful in a home office does not require putting on a suit every day, but it does demand sticking to what needs to be done, using the right tools, and approaching the job with the right mindset.  I have been very successful with shorts and a t-shirt for many years.  I don't miss the ties or the modems of the early years.

 

Our Quinquennial Technology Refresh

I have a long history of writing about technology in the month of December. Two of my favorite old articles are Please Don't Hit Me With Your Modem that I wrote in 2010 and Computer Battle that I wrote way back in 2004. Technology (and my opinions) have really changed since those articles got published.

I have been in the technology business for over thirty-five years which includes almost twenty years at Apple.  When you are a manager at a large technology company, you get spoiled with new technology.  However, it has been over thirteen years since I left Apple and I have figured out how to do with a lot less. Essentially I do a quinquennial, once every five years, technology fresh and am happy with it. Looking at technology that permeates our lives at least that regularly prevents a lot of problems.

We all need technology these days, and if you just wait for things to break before upgrading, sometimes recovery can get messy.  Sometimes we all need to buy something because of a death in the computer family but if I do my quinquennial refresh, that is rare.

I still know people that get a new computer every year or two but I do not feel that need any more than the need to get a new car every year. My main work computer is over seven years old but has had upgrades. Since I use five different computers most days (and that does not count my smartphone), I am not a normal computer user.  Most normal people might just have only one or two computers in their household. 

Our family technology refresh this year has included two new laptops, one for my wife and one for me.  A new wireless phone set. A new small television and a new digital camera. A few things have been improved by switching to gear that we already had or by adding new components.  I am really happy with the results.  Our computers are all working great. The pictures coming from my new camera are outstanding. Our new Panasonic DECT 6 wireless phone sets are fantastic especially the paging feature which makes life simpler since my workspace is far from the rest of the house.  We also bought a small $130 television set and added an Amazon Fire Stick for connectivity instead of connecting it to cable.  The television provides much better quality than our expensive Sony that was installed eleven years ago.

You can translate all this into something useful for yourself.  If you are buying a laptop this year and also only want to upgrade every five years like we do, expect to spend between $700 and $1,200 for a good laptop that will last five years or more. As I am writing this just before Christmas 2017, you should look for a minimum of an eight generation I5 processor, 8GBs of RAM, and a 256GB SSD (Solid State Drive). Your system should come with a touch screen and at the low end of the price range a minimum screen resolution of 1920x1080.  At the upper end, you should be getting much higher screen resolution, double the RAM and double the SSD capacity.  A system similar to these specs will last a long time.

Personally, I have had good luck with Lenovo, HP, and Dell laptops.  My wife's system was bought in the summer a few months before eight generation Intel processors were available but it is fine for her needs.  We both got both systems for less than the $1,999 price of one Mac Book Pro laptop with less impressive specs than mine. (Details in the geek section)

The one thing that might throw laptop purchasers who have been out of the market for a while is USB-C.  The hub pictured at the top of the post is one of the USB-C hubs that are common.  Some new laptops only come with USB-C ports now. My HP Envy has both USB 3 and USB-C.  With the help of my hub, one USB-C port provides Ethernet connectivity, the connection for a monitor and an SD card reader.  Expect to spend about $40 for a good USB-C hub. I consider mine more of a dock for the laptop when I am working at my desk as opposed to traveling.

My other upgrade to computers was to replace the last mechanical drive in my computer fleet with an SSD.  Since it was an older I5 Lenovo desktop with only 8GBs of RAM, I also installed Xubuntu Linux as the main operating system.  The system which was slow as molasses is now super speedy and very reliable.

While my son was visiting at Thanksgiving, he noticed that we had two wireless networks in our house. I had a wireless network with a router but it turned out that our relatively new cable modem had wireless turned on and was broadcasting DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) addresses. Without descending too far into a technology whirlpool, it was not good to have two WAPs (Wireless Access Point) competing for spectrum. I had not noticed since most of my serious computing is done in the wired portion of the network where my computers and printers are hooked up by Ethernet.  My son said he got better speeds out of the one from the cable modem so I removed mine from the network and fixed the new wireless setup so it uses OpenDNS servers which provide a little bit of filtering.

The new television we got was an inexpensive 32" Toshiba for around $130.  We bought it to replace an old-fashioned tube television in a bedroom but we are currently using it in our new family room until we can decide on (and afford) a new larger television. The picture quality is exceptional.  We are hoping to get one of nice LGs at some time in the future. I needed a new computer more than a new television. Our home entertainment equipment with the exception of the new TV is hopelessly outdated but my wife is happy with it and I hardly watch television.

The camera I got this year is a PANASONIC LUMIX FZ1000 4K Point and Shoot Camera, with 16X LEICA DC Vario-ELMARIT F2.8-4.0 Lens, 21.1 Megapixels, 1 Inch High Sensitivity Sensor. The big selling point for this camera is 20 megapixels and the 1-inch sensor.

I still use a Panasonic LUMIX DMC-LX100S 4K and my Canon SX60-HS which was repaired once again.  The SX60 is a refurbished replacement that I got when Canon could not repair my longtime favorite Canon SX50-HS. I am also still using the Nixon D3100 that I got in 2010.

We also bought a set of Panasonic KX-TGE475S Link2Cell Bluetooth Cordless Phones with Answering Machine.  We had replaced the batteries more than once on an old Pansonic set which we bought eleven years ago.  The phones were much cheaper from Amazon and the sound quality is noticeably better than our old ones.

If you are really interested in the geeky details of all the computers and how we got to do this about once every five years read the next section, but it is really written so I can remember the details the next time I have to do an upgrade.

-David

Technical Specs and How the Quinquennial Cycle Evolved

 The first priority this year was upgrading my wife's computer this summer.  She was well past the five-year mark on her laptop though she did get a Chromebook a couple of years ago and it extended the useful life of her other computer which was a 2010 I5 HP laptop with 4GBs of RAM and a 500GB mechical hard drive. While her old computer looked brand new, it had become slow and there was little that I could do to fix it without starting to replace parts.  We bought her laptop together with one for me back in February 2010.  The two laptops together cost around $1500 after rebates.  We considered Apple laptops but at the time we could not have gotten one Mac laptop for the price that we paid for the two HPs and the Mac laptops were stuck on an old processor.  You can read the full reasoning behind those purchases in this Applepeels post.

The quinquennial upgrade can be traced to a couple of years later when my HP 2010 laptop got repurposed and sent to my youngest daughter. There was nothing wrong with it but she needed a laptop and I was starting a stint as a technology writer at ReadWrite Web.  I needed new technology so I could write about operating systems and such. It was the fall of 2012 and on Black Friday that year we drove to Wilmington and I bought a Lenovo Yoga at Best Buy. It was $999 and had an I5 processor, 4GB RAM and a 64GB SSD (Solid State Drive.)  It was a little of bit of a gamble since we did not know how long my technology writing career was going to last.  The job seemed to go well so a few months later we bought a MacMini through a friend still working at Apple. That spring I also upgraded my main camera and got a Canon SX50 HS.  The technology upgrades were more than paid for by the articles that I wrote, but turning out articles was like being on a treadmill and predicting what might be of interest to an ever-changing editor was not a lot of fun.  It paid the bills but if you figured it as an hourly wage, it was scary. Fortunately, I had started my current job at WideOpen Networks the previous summer and about the time I burned out as a technology writer, the new company was coming up to speed.

I might have skipped this upgrade cycle but my main Windows desktop started dying on me this summer.  Over the course of a few months, I managed to keep it going but it finally gave up the ghost and I took it to a computer repair shop. This was the first time in over thirty-five years that I have ever taken one of my personal computers to a repair shop so you have to figure that the system was in serious trouble.  The shop finally determined that it was the motherboard but a new Lenovo motherboard was close to $400 dollars and more than I wanted to spend on an old computer.  They assured me that they could order another motherboard for $150, put it in my case with my 32GBs of RAM and I7 processor and everything would be fine.  A week later it turned out the third-party motherboard would not fit in the Lenovo case so we ended up ordering another case for about $100.  Once the case came in and the motherboard and all the parts were installed, the computer would still not turn on. With the next step being a new processor at $450, I pulled the plug on the operation and felt lucky that my repair shop billed me zero dollars since they could not fix my computer. It does not take a technology expert to know that spending close to $700 on an old computer is crazy.

At that point, I needed a new computer to do my photographs. I wanted a system with an eighth generation I7 processor, 16 GBs of RAM, and a 512GB SSD, and 3840 x 2160 screen. I managed to find a 13 inch HP Envy at Costco with those specs for $1,099.  Just to make certain that I was not making a mistake, I hauled my even-geekier son with me to Wilmington to make certain that I got the right computer for my needs. For comparison, my wife's system was a Lenovo 720 with the seventh generation I5, 8GBs of RAM, and 256 GB SSD. It cost around $800 with a touchscreen at 1920x1080 resolution.  We got our two systems, both with touch screens, fingerprint sensors, and mine with the latest I7 processor, a 512GB SSD, 2GB NVIDIA GeForce MX150 Graphics and 16 GBs of ram for $100 less than one Mac Book Pro with an older processor and only 8GBs of RAM.  Apple's laptop math continues to make no sense to me.

With a 13.3" laptop taking the place of my desktop, I wanted to make sure my ten-year-old Dell monitor was up to the task. My son took one look and said that it was losing its brightness. I took advantage of Dell's Black Friday's sale and got a new 27" Ultrasharp monitor for $395 instead of $595.  All I had to add for everything to be complete was the USB-C hub that I discussed earlier.

Another in a long line of home offices

I have been lucky to work in home offices most of my professional career.  The office was also the dining room on our Tay Creek farm.  In Halifax it was a small, designed-for-an-office space just off the main entrance. My wife claimed it was a great place to see the back of my head.

Our Columbia home had another tiny office just off the entrance.  When we moved to Roanoke in 1989, I got to use a huge space in our newly finished basement.  I takes three pictures to get a good view of it, picture 1, picture 2, and picture 3. It might seem overly large but for over a decade I ran Apple sales teams from there including the last few years when I was director of federal sales and had a national sales team.  I did everything from generate bids for colleges to house equipment that had no other home.

The Apple office made a great place for kids to play some of the first networked games. It also served as a second home for many projects from the Roanoke Valley Governor's School. There were always students borrowing the demo color laser printer that Apple was afraid to ship around and consequently dropped from the product line.  The Roanoke office was where I first got on the Internet.  We went from modems of varying speeds to line of sight antennae to DSL and finally to a cable modem.  I spent a lot of time on the modem dialing into Apple's IBM mainframe and downloading sales reports.

In 2006 after I had left Apple and was president of sales at WebMail.us, we had a water leak that meant the office got a remodeling and I had to start over.  I wrote this post, The Saturday afternoon technologist, electronic hair, just as I was starting up once again.  Sometimes it is good to start over because you get to clean up the cables which have a tendency to become like a ball of snakes after a decade or so.

The fact is that starting over is easier and easier. I have written about the instant economy that allows businesses to get what they need to start up in hours instead of months.  It is also very easy for a home office to get everything that it needs.  Sometimes all it takes is an afternoon trip to Best Buy or Staples.

Eleven years ago when I wrote about setting up my home office on the Crystal Coast in the post, The not so reluctant home system engineer, I had worked through a number of challenges getting things running smoothly.  Things have gotten a lot easier when it comes to networking and printers.  Because I have a son with even greater geek tendencies than me, I now have a NAS (Network Attached Store) with multiple terabytes of storage.  After thirty-five years in the technology world, I also have a pretty good idea of what works well.  With that in mind I had Cat 5 Ethernet run from my old office to my new office. 

I was a little surprised when our electrician did not know how to install the Ethernet jacks since I had seen our system engineers at Apple do it plenty of times.  I ordered from Amazon the needed punch down tool and punch down block with the right jacks and did it myself.  This being my first time at putting ends on Ethernet cables, I wondered if it would all work.  I hauled a laser printer upstairs to the new office and connected it to the wall jack. Then I ran an Ethernet cable from my current Ethernet switch to the new wall jack in my old office.  I sat down at my Mac and printed a document to the printer upstairs in the new office.  It worked.  Now I can gradually move things from the old office to the new one and never lose connectivity.  I am very happy that laser printers are a lot lighter than they used to be back in the eighties.

It is amazing how much technology has changed. My first blog post on View from the Mountain was almost thirteen years ago and I was wrestling with my first Windows/Linux machine.  My desktop has changed a lot since then. Windows occupies a much great part of it but I still have some vintage Macs chugging along in addition to my Windows computers and now Linux runs on my Mac instead of my Windows computer. My photo work is now all done on Windows but I think iMac from 2010 which got rescued by a repair will have a place in the new office for a while.

Some things do not change. I am still using an IKEA table as a first desk as I build my new office just like I did back in 2006. This is the first post written from my nice new office. It is a great spot to write.

A Worthy Sensibility

A life lived without passions for ideas or other people is a boring existence. 

However, a life lived with a fiery passion for things or ideas without respect for others and their opinions is a self centered life which damages the humanity of those which it touches.

There are some things which are central to my being. I believe that helping others achieve their reasonable goals in life is a good way to live. I strive to make any relationship or place where my presence has been felt better for my having been there.  After over sixty years, I am enough of a realist to know that this will not always happen.

People interpret things differently.  Often people hear different things when others speak or even read the same words and come up with different meanings.  Just look at the Second amendment. Its vague wording taken out of the context of time is something that people are willing to fight about hundreds of years later.

It is not just words on paper or the Internet that can drive people to disagreement. In our material world people can get very emotional about things.  We all have a bias towards things we like or perhaps the ones which have an important place in our lives.

I have raised Angus cattle, sold Vermeer round balers, and worked at Apple selling their computers.  To effectively sell a product, you need to believe in it and it is actually best if you know the product through using it yourself.

When I chose to raise Angus cattle while living the Canadian Maritimes, I did not pick the most popular breed in the area. I actually picked the breed which I thought would help me be successful.  Angus have a hard won reputation as cows which produce calves that need little or no assistance.  It turned out in the ten years that we had cattle, we probably had over five hundred calves born in our woods.  I might have helped two or three calves be born. We had the vet on a farm a couple times for a sick animal.  Angus lived up to their reputation for us.

Similarly I picked Vermeer balers for their reputation for quality and dependability. They worked well for me, and I sold several to other people. I could sell them easily because like most other Vermeer dealers I used the balers in our own operation. I used round balers at time when provincial agriculture people painted those of us using them as crazy.  When I traveled back to New Brunswick in the fall of 2012, thirty years after we sold all our cattle, I found every remaining cattle farmer using round balers.

When I went to work for Apple computer in 1984, I had already been selling computers, both Apples and PCs, for a couple of years.  The Macintosh had been on the market for a few months when I joined Apple.  I thought the Mac with its graphical user interface and WSIWYG display was a better way for computer users to get their work done.  I stayed at Apple nearly twenty years, but along the way a lot changed, computers became more similar than dissimilar.  I learned that in some environments people were very happy with their Windows computers.

Also during my time selling Apple computers, I ran into users who were so in love with the Macintosh and the whole idea of Apple that they made our job of selling Macintoshes into the enterprise harder not easier.  Some of them pushed the Macintosh so relentlessly that CIOs did not even want to hear the word Macintosh.  These lovers of Macs were perhaps the first "fanboys" that I encountered.

While I might have disagreed with a neighbor's choice of Hereford cattle instead of Angus, we were still neighbors and cattlemen.  We were more alike than different.  Similarly if someone bought an International or John Deere Round baler, we were all still considered crazy by the department of agriculture and besides that I had both John Deere and International tractors on our farm.

No long ago I had an idea that revolved around the supposition that most Apple users will pretty well blindly follow Apple wherever it leads.  The second part of the idea was that Apple users have a fundamentally different relationship with Apple than Microsoft users have with Microsoft. 

I backed my thoughts up with Apple users who are used to the idea that if there is a problem with their computer or iPhone, they are actually the cause of the problem. While I overstated my case to make a point, I do find that many Apple users are less demanding of Apple than Microsoft users are of Microsoft.  Fortunately there is a wide range of users in both camps.  There are some vocal Apple ones and also some acquiescent Microsoft ones.

My idea did not go anywhere, but it was one of things that just are not worth fighting over.  Who really cares whether or Apple users are more like sheep than Microsoft users.  Even if I made the argument would anyone remember it a couple years from now? The answer of course is no. It was only a thought and I did not care to fight over it.

Of course many things you write about are that way. Unfortunately people take them far more seriously.

There are those who are so in love with an iPhone or an iPad, that the slightest hint their products are not worthy of worship brings out a personal attack on the writer.  As is often the case, the worst comments are from those whose identities are usually at best hidden behind an online moniker and at worst "anonymous." While I have written about this issue before in the "The not so amazing lack of civility on the web," it still bothers me that I can be attacked as a person for something as simple as an opinion about a product.

Surely we have become civilized enough to agree that the happiness in your life is not dependent on whether you are using iOS or Android as your tablet or smartphone operating system. Isn't it possible that my opinion might be worth thoughtful consideration instead of condemnation?

Even if I might disagree with you on the second amendment, perhaps I am entitled to my opinion without verbal abuse from someone else.  It is just an opinion, I have not tried to have my thoughts turned into law.

If we end up living in a society where no one can disagree with a vocal minority or even majority, haven't we let ourselves become less civilized?

John Biggs offers some advice in his Agony of the Fanboy,

" Maybe you’re wrong. Understand this when you attack someone for what they’ve written: maybe they’re right."

And I would say amen to this from John.

"Let’s not fight. There’s beer to drink. There are people to woo and befriend. There are songs to be sung and board games to play."

And then I might add...

There is bread to bake, steaks to cook, along with miles of beaches and hundreds of square miles of water to explore. Let us not forget all the birds to watch and photograph and that there are a few fish left to chase and catch. Finally, I would rather end up your friend than your enemy.