King's Folly

Well, this weekend was an interesting exercise. I got contacted Friday morning by a former employer who had kind of a one-off project they needed help with, perferably over the weekend. The task was to build a fully-functional lab in AWS that would use a variety of services including their new AI services Translate and Polly. How new are they? I don’t know, it’s not like I really keep up with this stuff, but I know no one had services backed by neural networks a few years ago. This is machine learning technology, “AI” for the layman. And because this is 2021 and Amazon, they make  using  it as simple as seemingly possible. Just a black box of magic. With an orange smiley thing on the front. So like I said, I haven’t done much with AWS in several years, and the extent of my experience with it was setting up an EC2 instance and installing some open-source software. But I feel more comfortable with it all now. The final solution, which I finished up at 6pm Sunday evening, wound u...

"The Game" I play a video game called Apex Legends. It’s an online battle royale, like Fortnite’s older brother. You get put into a squad of 2 or 3 players, depending on which game mode you chose to play, each of you chooses your character (they have slightly different abilities), and then a dropship launches you into a battleground where you compete against 19 other squads (in Trios; 29 other squads in Duos). A ring of death slowly tightens a noose on the battleground, forcing squads to move closer together and fight until only one squad remains and is declared the Champion. I started playing Apex last year, February of 2020. My son had been playing it for a while. I’d given him a pretty hard time about this game where 90% of the gameplay appeared to be running around in a frantic state trying to accumulate your ideal combination of weapons, body armor, grendades, weapon attachments , and so on. The other 10% of the game, obviously, was the fighting. For the good players, wh...

 I forgot to put the chickens to bed last night. Well, they put themselves to bed, obviously. All I do is walk out to the coop and close the little door. If I time it right, they’re already sitting inside on their roosting bars, settling down. Ten minutes too early, of course, and they’ll still be milling about outside the run. Trying to round them up, catch them, or otherwise herd them into the coop is such an exercise in frustration that it’s simply easier to wait until they’ve put themselves to bed. So long as you remember to do it. Last night I did not remember to do it, as buttoning up the chickens often needs doing right as I’m cooking dinner or putting it on the table and calling the family, on the nights I’m cooking. It’s the sort of thing you can remember to do 364 days out of the year, and it can still have devastating consequences. Well, I am not personally devastated. But the chicken that lost its life, that woke me up at 5-something this morning, screeching (“screaming...

I can’t see how I could post every day. Seems far-fetched, an impossibility. But while this new energy takes me, might as well ride it while it’s here. I did a Google search on “how to find readers for your blog”. I should have known what I’d get. Articles aimed at your typical blogger today. That is, articles aimed at people wanting to make money off their blog, people trying to build either a business or a personal brand. It wasn’t helpful in the least, because that is not what I am doing here. I complained to my wife that the personal blogs of old don’t seem to exist anymore, but we quickly set me straight on that count. You simply have to look in the right places. I’m sure there are methods here, on Blogger, to explore other blogs, which I may do. I’m sure Wordpress.com has similar abilities. Both platforms seem to have “Reader” features, methods for you to compile perhaps lists or feeds of blogs you follow. That indicates to me that there are likely thousands to tens of thousands ...

We watched  The Circle  last night. You know, the movie where Emma Wattson goes from a naieve young new-hire at the world’s greatest tech company to a nightmare from my darkest fears of the future? I didn’t understand the movie at the time I watched it. I went into it not really clueing in that I’d need to do some thinking. It seemed a moralizing tale being spelled out in painfully small words using high volume and bright colors, just to make sure my tiny unthinking brain could understand the messaging.  And of course I’ve been trained by the industry in the standard 3-act structure to think that Wattson’s character Mae had been led astray but was going to go through the classic hero’s transformation, see where she and all had gone wrong, and right the ship at the end of it all. Turns out, I was the naive one. .*.*. In other news, today is the spring solstice. I guess that would explain the gray-haired dudes and ladies I saw in robes at the park.

The ditches need cleaning. Most of them. March is running out. Warm, dry days like these are hard to come by in the early spring of Southern Colorado. Some folks think we should swap out our open ditches for enclosed 10-inch piping. With clean-out valves. If you saw how much the sediment builds up year by year, though, you'd understand why we think that sounds like a terrible idea. Maybe the smooth inside surface of the pipe would let the silt just sweep along. Maybe it'd only build up at joints and junctions. Maybe the pipes wouldn't slowly sink into the ground and disappear. Maybe they'd last just long enough to be someone else's problem. Unless we spend the next 50 years here.  We're pretty slow to move, so it could happen. Of course, if we're digging the ditches out freshly every year, hah, we won't last 50 years. Picture me, 89 years old, shovel in hand and wheelbarrow by my side.  And 50 years of sediment from the ditches deposited upon the back pr...