Stung by the hack of ‘Del Mar Moms’, local coder and feared white-hat OG Jaime Anton struck back hard this morning, releasing “Area Man” – a new app that lets area residents avoid well-known Area Man Kenny McTavish.
“I was so tired of running into him, ” said Jaime. “And then Maggie said to me one morning, ‘There should be an app.’ And something just clicked for me.”
Few people knew that it was Anton who coded the Del Mar Moms app. But tech-savvy Nosarans saw his hand immediately in the app’s clean, dark-themed UI and the smooth, buttery scrolling experience – especially on Android. And as everyone around town knows, that buttery smooth feeling is what Jaime brings to everything. Especially his legendary shape-shifting escapades here in our little seaside town.
Over the past few years, Anton has punked nearly everyone in this community. He beat out Prendas Loria for the design of the new lifeguard tower on Guiones beach, spinning up a fake local design firm called “Somebody’s Cousin” whose proposal came in at $875, nearly $2.4 million less than the Donald Loria alternative. When KLM announced they would train local Sansa pilots to land their 737 widebodies at the Nosara Airport, Jaime put on his cheap black sunglasses and white shirt and went down to the Sansa office, pulling off three days in the simulator and several landings at SJO before being unmasked. And last month – in a punk that stunned even those who know him well – Jaime pretended to be Lobo, a rival Nosara design firm, and stuck them with the redesign of Alex’s fish market – with its 17 freezers inside.
As he increasingly encountered McTavish everywhere, all the time, Jaime got to thinking. “It suddenly hit me that all the data I needed to avoid Kenny was everywhere, all the time.” He paused and pointed upwards. “In the Bodhi Tree Airtracking signal.”
Jaime ran us through the tech. An Amazon Cloud server ports in the full Bodhi AirTag data stream, which – Bodhi having chosen a Pixel 6 from 2019 as the backbone for its system – is completely unencrypted. Inside the Amazon cloud server, this data stream gets fed into a NOAA fisheries algorithm that transforms all the blue dots into Northern Atlantic cod. A four-line chaos theory variable then amplifies all avoidant activity within the school of fish, and thins out the entire data stream to five large red dots, each representing a possible Kenny.
“That was the tough part,” said Jaime. “I had to figure out what these other things were that everyone was trying to avoid. But once I identified the sceptic truck from Santa Cruz, and the watermelon truck with the loudspeakers – I had him.”
The graphic UI of the Area Man app is not without humor. Area Man is shown in red next to his scraggly dog. The screen pulses on first detection, then pulses harder as distance-to-Area Man decreases. Escape routes flash up in real time at the bottom of the screen, and a large green doggie bag icon starts flashing urgently when contact seems unavoidable. “That’s Maggie’s trick,” laughed Jaime. “Faking a poop scoop move.”
On Area Man’s Instagram account, requests are flooding in for Jaime to add a line-up tracker before dry season arrives, when avoiding Kenny in the water becomes the main concern. “Maybe a premium-level add-on, someday,” laughed Jaime. Then he slapped us on the shoulder and added, “Hey, good running into you, man. I gotta go. Ceibo has a project he wants me to work on.”
