Bulldozer00's Blog

Before my cancer diagnosis, I tended to take my physical health pretty much for granted. Even though I exercised regularly for over 30 years and went to the doctor regularly for blood sugar, pressure, and cholesterol testing, I didn’t pay much attention to details. For example, whenever I caught a cold or cut myself or had back/muscle/joint pains I would just power through them without taking any meds other than ibuprofen. It’s amazing how robust and resilient the human body is despite the onslaught of constant attacks it repels every waking minute. Miraculously, all the hard work needed to keep us healthy happens silently and autonomously in the background.  We have the equivalent of a builtin operating system which performs all the low level functions required to allow the applications that run on top of it to have fun and wreak havoc in the world!

I bought a fitbit step tracker right away when it was unveiled waaaay back when. I religiously tacked on over 10,000 steps per day for several years. When I first got sick and my feet/leg started going hot and numb, my daily step count plunged. I was barely registering 500 steps a day. When the power charging contacts started rusting and I had trouble charging the device reliably, I said fuck it and threw it in the trash. I decided I didn’t need one anymore because my health was going to go down the shitter real fast (which thankfully, it didn’t!).

When Amazon announced their screenless Halo health tracker ($64), I was very intrigued by an innovative feature called “Tone“. After learning about what it does, I renamed it the “Assshole Detection” feature. I knew it was a perfect match for me!

The Halo has tiny microphones in it. It “learns” your voice patterns and then tracks the “tone” of your conversations with others. Tone is mapped into 4 categories as follows:

Now, if BD00 was director of Amazon Halo product development, his “tone” categories would be as follows:

The Halo app dashboard has a tidy little “tone” widget that let’s the user know how often and, more importantly, WHEN he/she has been an asshole throughout the day. Here’s an example of my performance:

I’m just glad no pink “Fuckin’ Asshole” moments were detected by the Halo police that day. Sadly, I’m not surprised by my embarrassing purple “Asshole” performance. I just hope it doesn’t go pink on me. I’ll have to make up an asshole card to go with my cancer card if it does.

But wait! It gets even more intimate. Halo decides WHAT IS, and then records, “notable moments“. No raw conversations are recorded. Here are a couple of examples:

As an added bonus, users can also save notable moments in asshole (.ass) files on hard disk.

If you think Halo’s “tone” feature is creepy, you might find its “body” feature really funky. But that’s for perhaps another post. I will tell you though that Halo wants to take your naked pictures and measure your body fat from the multi-angle pictures.