Jamie Todd Rubin's Blog, page 20

A Busy Afternoon

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A couple of weeks ago we had an usually busy Saturday afternoon. Specifically: a 4 hour period in which our three kids had to be at five separate events. Zone defense was a must in this situation, but required more than that. It required a game plan. We plotted the plan out the night before.

Things began just before 2 o’clock. Grace had to be at gymnastic practice for her team. That practice runs 2-1/2 hours on Saturdays. At 2:15, Zach had a soccer game. At about 20 minutes to two, I piled Zach and Grace into the minivan and headed to the sports and rec center where Grace has her gymnastics. I dropped her off there and reminded her that I’d be back before four o’clock to pick her up early. She had a birthday party to go to.

From there, Zach and I sped over to a local middle school where his soccer game was being held. Arriving there, I sought out his coach–also a family friend–and asked if he could take Zach home after the game. I had to leave early to transport Grace to a birthday party. Happily, he agreed to take Zach home.

When I finally, reluctantly left the soccer game, Zach’s team was losing 3-1 about 5 minutes into the second half. Zach had just gone in to play keeper.

I raced back to the rec center, found the very last parking spot available in the lot, and then dashed inside to remind Grace that she had to leave early. It was a fifteen minute drive from the rec center to the bounce hall where the party was being held. As part of our careful planning, Kelly had already filled out the waiver forms online. But because I was dropping her off and I was not Kelly, I had to fill them out all over again. Kelly also arranged for the hosts of the party–neighbors who live a few houses up the street from us–to bring Grace home afterward.

I headed back to the car and made the 20 minute drive back to the house. Zach had arrived home twenty minutes earlier. They lost their soccer game, but he played well.

Meanwhile… Around the time that Zach’s soccer game was starting, the Littlest Miss had a birthday party to attend at a nearby park. Kelly took her to the party. They had to leave the party early, however, because at 4:30, the Littlest Miss had a soccer game. As I write this, that soccer game is still in progress and I am missing it because I had all of these other things to attend to.

Both Zach and the Littlest Miss have soccer games tomorrow as well.

After a long week at work, I look forward to relaxing on the weekend. But today, and particularly this afternoon, felt busier and more fragmented than most of my work days.

I don’t ever remember being nearly this busy–in the structured sense–as a kid. My weekends frequently consisted of locating my friends, maybe swimming for a while (we were in Los Angeles, after all), playing capture the flag, and possibly making the long half-mile walk to 7-Eleven for candy and soda. The late afternoons and evenings were frequently filled with pickup touch football in the church parking lot across the street, or basketball games at the local junior high school (hopping the fence, since the gates were locked on the weekends). No calendar was required to make sense of the agenda for the day, and certainly not one that looked like this:

Four busy hours

Times change, of course, and today, in our neck of the woods, structured days like this are normal. Structured weekend days like this make me yearn for retirement. At least there will be five days a week I can count on for somewhat less structure. Only nine years and counting…

Written on April 23, 2022.

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Published on May 11, 2022 05:00

Practically Paperless with Obsidian, Episode 29: Filling Out Forms

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Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview.

It sometimes seems to me that most of the paper I deal with day-to-day are forms. I find this ironic. Given that so much of what we do is online, it seems almost archaic to fill out paper forms. And yet, that is what I do. I am the form-filler-outer in the family. If there is a form that needs to be filled out, it ends up on my desk. Kelly says this is because she is bad at filling out forms, but I like to think it is because I am fairly efficient about it. After all, I’ve filled out enough of them.

Obsidian is part of the reason I have become efficient filling out forms. By combining a number of its basic features, I’ve made it easy for myself to have all of the information I need at my fingertips when completing a form.

Family notes

The vast majority of the forms I have to fill out are for a specific person. School forms are for a specific student. Camp forms are for a camper, sports and other activities are for the participant in question. Then there are medical forms for the patient, insurance forms are for the insured, etc., etc.

The foundation of my system for filling out forms starts with a note for each member of the family (the only people I really ever have to fill out forms for). Each of these notes contains the most common information I’d need if I was filling out a form for the person in question.

Below is an example. I took an actual note as a model, but replaced the information with made-up data. You should get the idea:

An example of a family member note I use to fill out forms

In addition to the two sections shown above, the family notes also contains three sections containing medical information, school information, and emergency contact information. These sections make use of Obsidian’s embedded note functionality, pulling the information from supporting notes.

Supporting notes

In order to keep information up-to-date, I try to keep it centralized. I keep several notes for this purpose. These notes include:

Family doctorsCovid vaccination recordsOther notes with contact information

Within Obsidian, you can embed the contents of one note within another by adding a note link and prefacing it with a ! symbol. In addition, you can include the content of a particular section of a note by referencing just the section in the note link.

Within my Family Doctors note, for instance, I have a section for each doctor that we use. The section contains the doctor’s name, and then contact information for the doctor.

In the Covid vaccination records note, I have a section for each family member, and within that section, a table that lists the vaccinations and dates for each person.

Finally, I have other contact notes (people notes) with sections titled “Contact Info” that are used for emergency contacts. By using embedded links to these notes within my family person notes, I always have the most recent information in each of the family notes when I use them to fill out forms.

Embedding common information

Here is what the embedded sections look like in my fictional note:

Embedded sections of a family note

Now, here is what the source for the family member note looks like for each of these sections:

Source view of the embedded sections of a family note.

Note the highlighted links are embedded links to other notes. That means that I only have to update information in the source notes for it to be reflected in any notes in which they are embedded. It saves me from hunting down every reference to these notes.

Filling out forms

When it comes time to fill out a form, I go through the following steps:

Pull up the family member note for the person in question.Use the information in the note to fill out the form.If there is any information on the form that I couldn’t get from the family note, I’ll note it down (usually as a task in my daily notes) as something to add for the next time I have to fill out a form.When the form is filled out, I’ll scan it, add it to Obsidian, and note that I completed a form for whatever purpose in my daily notes for the day, with a link to the scanned document for reference.

Filling out forms shouldn’t be this hard. Indeed, this seems like the perfect task for A.I. to handle. Instead of focusing on identifying images in photos, or writing blog posts for people, I wish that A.I. focused on more practical tasks like filling out forms. For now, however, Obsidian helps me manage the information I need to fill out forms so that I don’t have to go hunting all over the place to find it.

In two weeks, I’ll post the final episode of my Practically Paperless series. The final episode will be on how I use Obsidian to manage projects. Why the final episode? It was never my intention for this series to go in forever. My focus was on finding practical ways of using Obsidian to go paperless. My original outline for the series had 20 episodes. As I wrote those episodes, I outlined 10 additional episodes. I’m ready to write about other things now and continue using Obsidian to be practically paperless. I’ll see you back here on May 24 for Episode 30.

Prev: Episode 28: Archiving in Obsidian: A Tour of My Digital Scrapbook
Next: Episode 30: Managing Projects in Obsidian (coming May 24, 2022)

Written on May 9, 2022.

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Published on May 10, 2022 05:00

A Work In Progress

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I don’t know about you, but I am a work-in-progress. When I was young, I’d tell myself I’d have it all figured out when I was in my 20s. In my twenties I passed the buck to my thirties. You get the picture. Still, I’d absolutely have “it” figured out by the time I turned fifty. Here I am at the half-century mark and I am still trying to figure things out. I have an idea now that maybe, just maybe, I’ll never quite figure it out.

There is something odd that turning fifty has done to me. I am still compulsively trying to improve in almost everything I do. On the one hand, “fifty” acts as a kind of shot-clock. Its countdown says, you better figure things out soon. On the other hand, “fifty” gives me an impatient look, rolls its eyes, and says, I can’t believe you haven’t figured this out yet.

What is there to figure out? Well everything. I don’t know when it started, but I am constantly telling myself I can improve at this thing or that. I should work out more, I tell myself. I’m only fifty, and if I come up with the right regimen, I could still have a chance at playing shortstop for the New York Yankees, right?

The books I read are filled with marginal notes (holographic1 and digital) with ways I can improve things based on the example of others. For the last year I’ve been thinking I could organize my day better, but how? Then, last week I came across this passage while reading H. W. Brands’s biography of Franklin Roosevelt, A Traitor to His Class:

Roosevelt’s White House day typically began a bit past eight in the morning…

“Too late for me,” I noted. I prefer to be up with the sun. “Arthur Prettman would,” it continues,

bring breakfast and a stack of morning newspapers. Roosevelt scanned the front pages and read the editorials of the papers which generally included The New York Times and Herald Tribute, the Washington Post and Times-Herald, the Baltimore Sun, and the Chicago Tribune.

“What can I learn from this?” I noted. I read three papers: the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. I tend to start with the Post’s metro section and I never skip an obituary for someone who lived to at least 100 years old. Then I skim the front pages of all three, and finally, tackle the editorials. Often the obituaries are the most interesting part of the news, which I why I start with them.

I have a ton of print magazine subscriptions and I try to read one feature article a day, jotting notes about what I can learn from it.

I have notes sitting around with titles like “Rules to Live By” and “Ideas for a Daily Workout Routine.” They are works-in-progress, much like me.

I am constantly looking for ways to improve. Big ways and small ways. When three loads of laundry are piled on our bed, as I fold it I wonder: is there a better way to do this? Doing the dishes I wonder: is there a more efficient way to get the kitchen cleaned up after dinner? At work I’ll iterate through several versions of slides looking for the best possible way to present information.

Drifting off to sleep at night I wonder: did I learn any new words today? When interacting with the kids, could I have done anything better? Been more empathetic about the complicated story they told me about what happened at school? Could I have helped out more with the various activities that go on during the day? If the answer is yes, then how?

I used to let these thoughts keep me up at night. Now, I’ll jot them down so that I can think about them in the morning. In that sense, I have improved a little. I fall asleep much faster than I used to.

Now, if I could only figure out how to stay asleep through the night. But I’ll save that for another time. Maybe when I am sixty and fully retired, I’ll sleep through the night. That gives me about ten years to work on it.

This is what I mean. I am a work-in-progress.

Written on April 22, 2022.

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I’m using the term in its less common definition, “written entirely in the handwriting of its author.” ↩

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Published on May 09, 2022 05:00

Digital Paragraphs: Tabs or Carriage Returns?

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These days, I do all of my writing in plain text files using Obsidian. It is the first time since college that I have done all of my writing in a single place. Back in college that writing happened in Word for DOS 5.5, which is my favorite word processor of all time. Plain text files have lots of benefits, and I’ve written about those benefits elsewhere. Markdown allows me to include simple formatting within my files, just what I need without going overboard.

There is one thing about writing in plain text files that I miss, however: how paragraphs are designated.

In print media, paragraphs traditionally begin with an indented first line. Lines are separated by a single carriage return. Turn to a page of just about any book, magazine, or newspaper and you’ll know what I am talking about. Let’s call this the old paragraph style.

Here is an example. This paragraph is indented by five space in the first line, and then wraps back to the left edge the way it would in a printed book or article. Any subsequent paragraph would also indent five spaces (or one "tab"). Like this.

Text editors like Obsidian are not word processors. The latter is specifically designed for formatting text on a page. The former is a storage medium for text and formatting is incidental. I find it difficult, almost impractical, to use traditional paragraph formatting in a text editor. Instead, paragraphs are delimited by a double carriage return and no indentation on the first line. This convention has become standard for online media. This post, for instance, is formatted this way. Let’s call this the new paragraph style.

I was raised on the old paragraph style, and I’ve got to admit that I still prefer it to the new paragraph style. It strikes me as odd that two styles should have evolved for print and digital mediums. Words on a screen are no different than words on a printed page. Indeed, my Kindle uses the old paragraph style, even while most blogs use the new paragraph style.

Markdown-sensitive interpretters treat “tabs” as indentations for the entire block of text in question. If I try to use old paragraph style in Obsidian, for instance, the result is not a paragraph with the first line indented. It is a paragraph that is completely indented. I’m sure there are ways of using CSS styles to alter this behavior. But probably it isn’t worth it.

Consider that an old style paragraph uses a tab and a carriage return to delimit its start and end. A new style paragraph uses a double carriage return. If we assume that a carriage return is a single “newline” character then 2 characters are used to delimit a paragraph in either style.

Or is that true? A “tab” is a single character that ultimately represents n number of spaces, where n is fairly arbitrary. The debate between using tabs versus spaces is as heated in the developer world as the debate between one or two spaces after a sentence in the writer world. Is a tab a single character or is, say, five consecutive spaces. If the latter, then an old style paragraph takes up more “space” in a file than a new style paragraph.

I don’t know what got me thinking about this. I didn’t sleep well last night, and perhaps it was reading articles on my phone to pass the time that got me thinking about paragraphs. I like the look of old style paragraphs better than the look of new style paragraphs. There is a compactness about them that makes me think of lean, tight prose. But in the digital world of text editors like Obsidian, they are too much of a headache to worry about.

Written on April 22, 2022.

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Published on May 08, 2022 05:00

Reading for the Week of 5/1/2022

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Here is what I read this week. Some of the articles/posts may require a subscription to read them. I also share my recommended reads on Pocket for anyone who wants to follow along there.

BooksFinished John le Carré: The Biography by Adam Sisman. I’ve only read a few le Carré novels, and his memoir, but he seems like a fascinating person and this biopgraphy confirmed that. It is also always interesting to me to see the evolution of a writer from a nobody to a celebrity. The Hawk’s Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty by Sy Montegomery. I enjoyed Sy Montegomery’s book on the octopus and this short book on falconry was almost as enjoyable. All The President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. I have two reasons for reading this book: one is because I recently read Carl Bernstein’s memoir, and the other is that I have a vague idea for a story involving an investigative journalist and so this book could be considered research.In Progress A Darkness More Than Night by Michael Connelly. I was looking for a change of pace, and in particular, something set in L.A. I’ve already read the first 8 of Michael Connelly books, so I settled on another Bosch novel for the weekend. In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 by Isaac Asimov. I’m taking my time with this book, which I started last week, luxuriating in it, since it is the first time I’ve read it in a dozen years.Articles/posts Neil Gaiman: ‘Whatever I loved about Enid Blyton isn’t there when I go back as an adult’ by Neil Gaiman (The Guardian, 4/29/2022)Breadmaking Fail – Melanie Novak by Melanie Novak (blog, 5/1/2022)Design = Action by Mike Dariano (The Waiter’s Pad, 5/3/2022)Roe v. Wade May Be Overturned, a Leaked Draft of Supreme Court Opinion Indicates by Jess Bravin and Brent Kendall (Wall Street Journal, 5/3/2022)Home Buyers Rushed In as Mortgage Rates Rose, Boosting Housing Prices Across U.S. by Nicole Friedman (Wall Street Journal, 5/3/2022)Leaked draft Supreme Court opinion would strike down Roe v. Wade by Robert Barnes and Mike DeBonia (Washington Post, 5/3/2022)In a Lonely Place (1950): The Best Bogart Film You’ve Never Heard Of – Melanie Novak by Melanie Novak (Golden Age of Hollywood, 5/4/2022)Database Plugins and More New Themes by Christopher Grieser (Obsidian Roundup, 5/7/2022)

Any recommendations for books, articles or posts I should read? Let me know in the comments?

Written on May 07, 2022.

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Published on May 07, 2022 13:00

What’s Going On With Medium?

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I don’t know what’s going on with Medium. It has become a weird echo chamber of whatever article you happen to click on. The tuning of its recommendation engine seems off. It is like someone turned a dial somewhere all the way to eleven and the results are strange to say the least.

I pay an annual subscription to read the articles on Medium, mainly because I’d encounter a reference to one that seems interesting to me frequently enough to be worthwhile. When I did this, I also adjusted my settings for some of the topics that I am interested in. These include: remote work, leadership, outdoors, product management, nonfiction, creativity, writing, design, sports, history, productivity, books, data science, mindfulness, technology and science.

With these interests, I’d expected a wide range or articles, but what I get seems highly based on what I just read. I clicked on an article about Vim, the text editor, not too long ago, and suddenly, it seemed every article suggested at that point was about Vim, and none of my other interests were considered. Not only that, but there is a weird pattern to the suggestions. Medium seems to prefer articles on the extremes. Thus, I was presented with an article titled, “Why Everyone Should Use Vim,” which was followed immediately by an article titled, “Why Vim is Highly Overrated.” There didn’t seem to be much in between. Medium can’t seem to make up its mind about VIm.

I’ve read or skimmed Medium articles enough to have discerned certain patterns that stand out. Titles with numbers in them are big on Medium. I pulled up my feed just now and here are the first article titles listed in order as I see them:

Why I “Cheated” to Get to the 100 Follower Mark4 Ways to Trick Yourself to Write Better ContentDo You Want to Write for the Orange Journal?5 Monthly Subscriptions I Will Never Pay ForNow You Can Earn $1000 as a New Writer Without Curation and Major PublicationsDid You Know You Could Make 17K a Month Writing Short Weather Forecasts?

Medium articles are frequently are self-reflexive or recursive pieces. All six of those pieces above, for instance, are related to writing on Medium itself. When it comes to the topic of writing I find Medium almost useless. All of the articles are about writing articles for Medium.

Gaming the system seems to be another pillar of the Medium establishment. “Cheating” to get to the 100 follower mark. Rules are another pillar: 20 Rules for Writing Your First Book. “Absolutes” are yet another pillar. Article titles contains words like “must”, “never”, “always” abound. Here is one about 3 Things People Who Are Good With Money Never Buy.

More than anything else, Medium has become a place to write about Medium. How to be successful there, how to fail there, how to earn $2,000 a month there, how to gain 10K followers in overnight. Rarely, since subscribing, have I come across an article with any real substance. That’s too bad, really, because in principle, I like the overall concept behind Medium. It just seems to have taken a weird turn.

Since I’ve already paid for my subscription, I’ll keep it until its renewal date, at which point, it is very likely that I won’t renew it. Substack has Medium beat in terms of both the quality of the writing and its usefulness. As I have written before, I think Substack’s subscription model is not sustainable for more than a handful of subscriptions per person (I subscribe to three Substack newsletters, at roughly $60/each per year). But, by giving up my subscription to Medium next year, I can add a fourth newsletter at Substack.

Written on April 3, 2022.

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Published on May 07, 2022 05:00

How to Improve Baseball: Trade Speed for Endurance

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Baseball is something that I really enjoy. Beyond just watching a game, there is a rich history to the sport1. That history ties together generations going back to the Civil War. People playing baseball in the 19th century would recognize the game today and vice versa–or, at least, that used to be the case.

Baseball has always been a business. To deny that is to deny obvious history. For a time, the business and the game seemed to find precarious balance. That no longer seems to be the case. Business has taken over. When I read baseball history, of times when the players were underpaid and taken advantage of, I rooted for the players and hooted at the owners. Free agency was a big break for players, finally releasing them from the barbed hook of the reserve clause. The problem is that the players became part of the business. When players almost routinely get 8- and 9-figure contacts, how can it be otherwise? When teams invest that much in players, how can they not look to do anything they can to increase viewership of the game, even if that means changing the very nature of the game itself?

The biggest complaint I read about baseball is that it is too slow. At the end of the Second World War, the average length of a baseball game was 2 hours and 7 minutes2. In the year I was born, the average length jumped to 2 hours 23 minutes. The average length of a game passed the 3 hour mark for the first time in 2014. In 2021, it was 3 hours and 11 minutes the longest so far.

I find the last stat interesting. For years baseball has been tweaking the game to find ways to speed it up. For example, they made it so that pitchers could call an intentional walk without requiring a pitcher to throw any pitches. That would speed up the game. I considered that intentional nonsense. Meanwhile, “instant” replay was introduced to the game, but there was nothing “instant” about it.

Now there is talk of adding a pitch clock to the game. Clocks are anathema to baseball. One of the things that makes the sport unique is that there is no clock, never has been. Introducing one takes things too far for my taste.

Another complaint is that there is not enough action in the game. People want to see hits, they want action. I agree with that, but I also appreciate the strategy of the game in much the way I imagine a seasoned chess player sees the strategy of a chess game unfolding on the board before them.

What to do then? How do you speed up the game while generating more “action”?

I have what I think is a fairly simple solution: trade speed for endurance.

Fans of my age (and older) will often lament that too few pitchers pitch complete games anymore. Indeed, if we take another look at the years we looked at above, then we’ll find that at the end of the Second World War, there were an average of 2.13 pitchers per game. In the year I was born that jumped to 2.45 pitchers per game. In 2021, the most recent full season, there were 4.43 pitchers per game. The reason pitchers no longer pitch complete games is because they throw so much harder than they used to. The 100 MPH fastball is commonplace today. Pitchers who throw that hard have to protect their arms. Teams have to protect their investment in those pitchers3, and therefore, starters now routinely aim to go 5-6 innings instead of nine.

At the same time, hitters don’t hit as much because they are facing 100 MPH pitches. They strike out a lot more. When they do connect, however, they send the ball sailing over the fences because to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and a 100 MPH fastball will fly if you can manage to make contact with it. So we don’t see a lot of excitment on the field anymore. We strikeouts and home runs.

When I say that baseball should trade speed for endurance, I am talking about a solution to address both of these problems. Baseball should look to trade speed (100 MPH fastballs) for endurance (more complete games). Two main results of this address the problems at hand:

If starters were required to go a minimum of 8 innings (unless injured), the game would speed up. There would no longer be 4-5 pitching changes per game. Each pitching change takes from 2-3 minutes. Cutting these down from 5 to 1 per game shaves off 8 to 12 minutes per game. Immediately our “average” length drops from 3 hours and 11 minutes down to 2 hours 59 minutes.Forcing a starter to pitch 8 innings means severely limiting 100 MPH fastballs. This means more hitting and more hitting means more action during the game to make the game exciting.

There is no need to add a pitch clock. No need to introdce rules that prevent strategy like infield shifts. Pitchers have to rely on more than just a fastball to get batters out. They need their teams to back them up. Hitters get back into the game.

Of course, such a move more or less elimates the need for middle relief, and while that’s unfortunate, some sacrifices have to be made to maintain the integrity of the game. Closers are still allowed in this scenario, although I’d encourage starters to go for complete games.

As to whether or not such changes would really work, one can point to history. Until around 1962, it was more common for there to be 2 pitcher in a game than 3. There were of hits, lots of action, and faster games. Maybe not as many home runs, but we are looking for action and excitement right? Plus, wouldn’t it be cool to see pitchers go the distance again?

This is my suggestion for how to improve baseball: trade speed (of pitches) for endurance (of pitchers) and see what happens. I think more people would watch games just to see how these changes would play out.

Written on April 21, 2022.

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My reading list tells me that I’ve read 39 books on baseball and baseball history in the last quarter century. ↩ See this link in Baseball-Reference.com for these stats ↩ See how the Dodgers pulled Clayton Kershaw in the 6th inning of a perfect game for just that reason. ↩

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Published on May 06, 2022 05:00

Practical Uses for A.I.

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Recently, the New York Times Magazine had a long article on artificial intelligence: “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?” by Steven Johnson. The focus of much of the article was on how A.I. has evolved to the point where it can produce human-sounding prose. Give GPT-3 some text and it will continue writing along the theme you’ve selected. Indeed, I frequently see ads for services like Jasper, which touts itself as artificial intelligence that “makes it fast & easy to create content for your blog, social media, website, and more!”

This is a depressing turn for artificial intelligence. Who would have thought that the focus of “practical” A.I. would be on organizing photo albums (identifying objects and people) and writing blog posts. I want to write my own blog posts. Indeed, I wish I had more time to do it. Why isn’t artificial intelligence helping out with any of that?

It seems to me that practical uses for A.I. include activities that free up time in our day so that we can spend more time on activities that we enjoy. Consider some examples typical from my own day.

I find myself frequently filling out forms. Whether it is to pay a medical bill–the payment websites for these are always different and never simple–or completing online forms for school, or kids’ activities, or camps, or passport applications–I’m not sure a day goes by when I don’t fill out a form of one kind or another. What I’d like to see is an A.I. that can fill out these forms for me. There are millions of forms on the Internet with which to train such an A.I. I could have a personal repository of information that the A.I. could use to complete the forms. In a rare instance where the A. I. can’t answer a question, it can ask me. Once I answer, it knows that answer forever. Then, whenever I need to fill out a form, I can set the A. I. on it.

Searching for the least expensive airfare or hotel is time-consuming and never fun. Why can’t an A. I. do this for me? I’d give the A. I. some criteria: date ranges, flexibility, locations, etc. My A. I. can “negotiate” with the airline and hotel A.I.s, seeking out the best deal. When it finds something, it can present the options to me and I can sign off on one. And since booking the hotel or flight usually involves filling out a form, once I approve, the A. I. can handle that as well.

One of my least favorite things is calling customer support. Why can’t my A. I. handle this? Whether it actually “calls” or interacts with a bot of some kind, if I am having a problem, my A. I. should be able to handle it. If it is software-related, it could even perform the necessary fixes that the technical support suggests. I think an A. I. would be good at things like requesting information, or making updates to various service accounts.

In my day job, I frequently have to deal with contractors. Outside of work, I sometimes have to do this as well. Finding a good contractor and then figuring out if their quotes are reasonable is always tricky, especially in areas where I don’t have a lot of experience. For instance, say I want to put an addition on my house. It would be great if I could have an A. I. go out and evaluate contractors based on my requirements, narrow the field, and set up meetings. After I meet with the contractors, the A. I. could take their proposals, compare them against millions of other proposals looking for ones that are similar, identify problems, figure out the most reasonable pricing, and ultimately come back to me with a set of recommendations on which contractor I should choose and why.

For that matter, it would be great if an A. I. could help manage our daily calendars. An A. I. could optimize our calendars, scheduling events for our kids so that they don’t overlap, or overlap in such a way as to make sure we can reasonably make the events. It could accept or decline invitations based on our schedule and preferences. If I needed to schedule a meeting with some people, the A. I. would take care of it, finding a time that worked for everyone.

I’d like an A. I. that would read and reply to most of my email, passing to me those ones from friends and family that require a personal response.

If I had an A.I. that could do all of these things — a digital chief-of-staff — I’d have a lot more time to spend doing the things I enjoy doing, like writing my own blog posts. If there are any entrepreneurs out there, the niche you should be looking for, the one that just might make someone the first trillionaire, is the bureaucracy layer. Put artificial intelligence to work on bringing down artificial barriers. If personal A.I.s could tackle the bureaucracy layer, I think my life would get a lot easier. I can organize my own photos and write my own tweets. What I am really looking for are practical uses for artificial intelligence.

Written on April 20, 2022.

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Published on May 05, 2022 05:00

May the Fourth Be With You

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I was five years old when I saw Star Wars sometime in the spring/summer of 1977. My parents took my brother and I to a local drive-in theater to see it. I have only the vaguest memories of that time: I recall being in the back seat of the car. I have a memory of Darth Vader seeming scary. Beyond that, nothing sticks. The movie really settled into my mind a year or two later, when it was re-released in theaters. This happened in 1978 and 1979, and I’m not sure which time I saw the film in theaters. By then I was six or seven years old and was taken with the film and the marketing that surrounded it.

I really got to know Star Wars when it came to H.B.O. I don’t know how many times I watched it when it first came out, but it seemed to play constantly. If I had to guess, I’d say I saw the movie two dozen times at least during the inital months it was released. I thought it was so cool that I could watch that movie in the comfort of my own home.

Strangely, I have no memory of seeing The Empire Strikes Back although I know I saw it in a theater when it was released. I recall talking about it with my brother. I do remember seeing Return of the Jedi as part of a birthday party with friends. My brother couldn’t go and when I got home, I excitedly recounted to him the entire story with no thought of spoilers.

Then for sixteen years there was nothing. When it was announced that George Lucas was going to do a new trilogy of prequels, I was thrilled. I remember watching as those trailers were released online and being blown away by what I was seeing. I noted in my diary on May 18, 1999, “First public screenings of Star Wars: Episode I begin tonight at midnight.” My excitement built to a fever pitch.

Two days later, I wrote: “Left work at 3:30pm today so that I could steop at Century theater on the way home and pick up Star Wars tickets. I have them now (I’m listening to the original soundtrack) and I am so excited! The anticipation is building by the minute. I haven’t see it but I wonder what I will write here when I get back from the movie tonight.”

Later that night, having returned from the movie, I wrote, “11:50pm. Back from Star Wars: Episode I and it was terrific! I felt like a little kid as the movie started up and I was entralled for the entire show. It was great fun, great visual effects–makes me want to run out and become a Jedi! I can’t wait for the next one, now two years off.”

When it comes to movies, I don’t ask for much. I’m looking to escape and Star Wars is a great escape. I’m one of the few people I know who really liked the most recent trilogy, and am of the opinion that the best Star Wars movie since the original is the anthology film Rogue One.

When time came to introduce my own kids to Star Wars, I was once again as excited as I was when I was a kid myself, and I think they caught my enthusiasm. And while I never got into The Manadalorian or The Book of Boba Fett, I am very much looking forward to Ewan McGreggor reprising his role as Obi-Wan Kenobe beginning on May 27.

Written on May 2, 2022.

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Published on May 04, 2022 05:00

The New Monitor

I can remember days in the late 1980s and through most of the 1990s when a single monitor (and not a particularly large one) was suitable for all of my work. When I started at my job in late 1994, for instance, Windows 3.1 was still the main operating system. A single application open at a time in the foreground filled the screen. Not too long after, Window 95 took over and I was astounded by the ability to run applications side-by-side. As time passed I begn I using the highest resolution to maximimze screen acreage.

At some point, I remember seeing people using multiple monitors. At first it was two. Eventually, most people seemed to settle on three screens as optimal. Before the Pandemic, when I still went into the office, our flex spaces featured two large monitors mounted on swivel arms. Those two monitors, and the screen of my MacBook Pro served as my standard screen acreage for several years. I had each monitor assigned to a particular set of tasks:

My laptop screen was for email and Teams meetings.The large screen on the left was my “working” screen. Any active work happened there: coding, document preparation, etc.The large screen on the right was dedicated to notes.

I missed this three-screen setup in my home office. I never quite got used to whittling the function of three screens down to two. I managed to get my work done, but I felt like I was flipping between apps a lot more than I used to. Every now and then I considered getting an extra monitor, and each time I kept putting it off.

Yesterday morning, it came to mind again. I was doing some work early and decided once again that things would be a lot simpler if I had a third screen to help out. I did some searching online, found a relatively inexpensive monitor, and ordered it. It happened to have same-day delivery, and yesterday afternoon, it arrived and I set it up. I made sure it was the same size as my existing monitor, 24″, which is good enough for my purposes (at work our screens were 32″ I believe).

As you can see in the image above, the new monitor lacked the ability to be raised or lowered from its base. To bring it level with my existing screen, I needed to raise the base about 3-1/2 inches. Fortuately, the combintation of two large paperback books–Jerusalem by Alan Moore and The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan–were exactly 3-1/2 inches and brought the monitors level. I plugged the new screen into the HDMI port on my Mac Mini and it worked perfectly.

This morning, however, I realized a small problem. My MacBook Pro does not have an HDMI adapater. I ordered a USB-C to HDMI adapter from the local Target, and I’ll go pick it up after finishing this post and dropping the girls off at school. I will then once again have my three screens for work.

When connected to my Mac Mini, I will now have two screens. This is fine because I don’t need as many screens as I do for work. It will, however, be nice to have a screen dedicate to having my notes open at all times as I am doing more and more in Obsidian these days.

Written on April 20, 2022.

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Published on May 03, 2022 05:00