Do we do Advent Calendars?
Every year, Uncle B very kindly buys me an Advent Calendar. I tend to get horribly behind, because it wasn’t a feature of my childhood and I forget.
Do Americans do Advent? I know the calendars aren’t common, but I wonder if observation of the Advent might be. Catholics, maybe?
I was raised plain vanilla Presbyterian, me.
December 6, 2021 — 8:16 pm
Comments: 21
That’s not how I pictured him at all
This is Steve Ibsen, creator of the Kitty Cat Dance. You remember the Kitty Cat Dance, don’t you? Somehow, I thought this guy would look…gayer.
Well, here he is telling the story. He created it in 2004 when he was 17 and a poor student and it astonished him when it went viral. Then a stranger claimed it on YouTube and monetized it. Eventually, Ibsen convinced YT he was the real creator, but he never got the money he believes it had generated.
Not really worth a watch. Another person goes viral and is astonished when that has no real world meaning at all.
But wait – he’s auctioning off the Kitty Cat Dance as an NFT. I still can’t get my head around NFTs. It’s like buying your own suit of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Though in Ibsen’s case, he’s actually selling the original hard drive with his working files on, so at least you’re getting something tangible.
You’re welcome for the earworm. Have a good weekend!
December 3, 2021 — 8:29 pm
Comments: 6
What have I done?
I was away from my desk today and I needed to make a note to do something and I pulled out my phone and I was like, “Damn, I cannot be bothered to type this on that teeny screen keyboard with my thumbs.” So I turned on Google Assistant.
It’s like Alexa for your phone, but instead of patching you into the evil Amazon it patches you into the evil Google. Much better. It’s also a really terrific speech-to-text app.
You say “Hey, Google” to wake it up, then “open sticky notes” and “send out a meeting reminder tomorrow” and done. Neat!
Pretty low privacy risk, I thought. I’ll only use it for work stuff and I don’t take my phone everywhere. And then I was poking around the web looking for more fun things I could do with it, and I found this:
Gboard voice API hàs a voice recognition learning processor. The more you use it the better it becomes with that users voice. Unfortunately if you ever clear your cache in Chrome or in Gboard, it takes away some of it’s learned recognized voice commands that has built up in your device memory. But from Googles main CPU that’s connect to your account with recognize voices, it will continue to expand even after you’ve clear your cache on your device because it’s connected to your account. But I’m not sure what Google does with that information if the account is deleted but if I know Google like I think I know Google it will connect the dots if that voice ever gets connected to other account.
And then it occurred to me that from now until the end of time, if I speak in the presence of a Google-enabled device, it will clock who I am and where I am, sure as fingerprints. How could I be so stupid?
But then I thought…Pff! Like they didn’t already have my voice print. And yours and everyone else’s. Yay!
Still, you can ask Google Assistant to tell a Yo Mama joke if you’re feeling blue.
December 2, 2021 — 7:57 pm
Comments: 9
Heh.
Fishermen block the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) from putting to sea to rescue illegal immigrants. France has been launching them toward England, to the tune of 29,000 this year, and the RNLI has been picking them up and bringing them ashore. (Whereupon we buy them a fast food meal on the docks and then put them up in a fancy hotel, wish I was kidding but am not).
From the article, it sounds like it was just some guys on the shore fishing, not the fleet.
“There was a group of fisherman pulled up, gutting fish on the shore, and as the boat station opened up we heard the fisherman start shouting things like ‘don’t bring any more of those home, we’re full up’, ‘that’s why we stopped our donations’, and that kind of really horrible stuff.”
It won’t help at all, but it gave me a smile. A neighbor of ours recently found an abandoned boat pulled up on the bank of a local creek late at night. I can’t tell you how much this stuff gives an unarmed weasel the willies.
It’s a damn shame about the RNLI. It’s a volunteer organization and they work their guts out, but management went woke several years ago. We used to contribute to our local lifeboat station, until the national organization fired a volunteer because he had a bikini girl on his tea mug. When last seen, they were trying to raise funds to teach overseas muslim girls in burkhas how to swim. Still not kidding.
December 1, 2021 — 8:58 pm
Comments: 6