Part of the holiday experience back in the 1980s was to fire up the Apple ][ computer, put in the diskette for “The Print Shop”, and print out Christmas cards and banners.
If this flooded back some memories for you, perhaps you’d like to do it all again this Christmas!
Head over to https://theprintshop.club which is a complete Apple ][ emulator with “The Print Shop” preloaded, where, from your own web browser, you can create a card, sign, letterhead, or banner, just like you used to do 40 years ago. When you’re finished, the website will generate a PDF file for you that you can print on your home printer. Likely, a lot less loud and annoying than the old dot-matrix printers of days gone by!
There’s only one guy in the United States that makes the kind of orthotics that work well for Bethany, and they are nearly 8 years old. After 8 years of the kind of active lifestyle we live, wear is to be expected. Even then, I didn’t exactly expect that Bethany would have worn a hole in the heel of carbon fiber!
So with maybe a week or two notice, we were back to Las Vegas for an emergency repair and overall refreshening of the rivets, straps, Velcro, and all the other pieces that have seen better days. Mitch from Ortho Rehab Designs repairs carbon fiber in-house, a process which fascinated me as he explained it.
Of course, while we waited for the 2-day repair process to finish, we had time on our hands. But without Bethany’s braces, we had to experience Vegas as if the technology to allow Bethany to walk didn’t exist. And that meant some very real on-the-job training in ADA for both of us, and the real-life sociology and difficulties people that use wheelchairs go through every day.
We drove around Vegas and experienced the strip, which has changed quite a bit in the last 8 years. The F1 race just finished up as we were arriving, and it was kind of cool to be driving on the actual track the F1 drivers drove on! Our hotel, the Fontainbleau, had F1 cars and Aston Marton’s in the lobby to celebrate the event. Much of the strip was still in its reconfigured format for the week. The locals were so happy it was over, they couldn’t tell me enough!
We stopped by the Arte Museum which was a very modern museum that tantalized your senses of sight, sound, taste, and smell, so that you were totally immersed in each room with an original artwork. Dozens of projection systems in each room blanketed the walls and floor, and dozens of speakers surrounded you with music and ambient sounds of the scene you were a part of. Each room smelled different, like forest or flowers. Bethany and I colored a picture of an elephant on paper, which after placing underneath a scanner, instantly materialized on the wall and started walking around and trumpeting. In the tea room, when you moved your tea cup around the table, scanners would follow it and create pictures inside your cup which would disappear as you picked it up to take a sip. This was one of the coolest things I’ve done in Vegas!
We returned from Vegas very early Wednesday morning, just in time for a final day of work before the holiday.
Which brings me back to being thankful, for a lot of things. It’s fantastic that technology exists and people exist that strive to better the lives of others. Mitch from Ortho Rehab Designs who designed, engineered, and builds custom carbon fiber braces in his own office. The wonderful bell desk at Fontainebleau that procured a folding wheelchair for us so we could continue with our adventures. All the people that didn’t treat us any differently along the way.
And outside of the trip, I remain thankful for my family. I remain thankful for the friends that stand beside me in my life. I am thankful for good health and the gifts I have received in my life that allow me to live the way I do. And I am very thankful for Bethany.
Thanksgiving to me is not just the holiday in the way of Christmas. It is truly a time we should all reflect on how lucky we are. Take a few moments today to do just that!
Netflix showed last night that while its content delivery networks (CDNs) continue to work well delivering static content, I believe their edge infrastructure in regional internet exchange points (IXPs) were completely unprepared for a live presentation that millions of people were watching.
Netflix can start by adding more infrastructure in the 511 Building in downtown Minneapolis, because most people in this area that I talked to had to keep hitting refresh or go back 10 minutes in order to view a potato 240p stream of the fights. However, if you used a VPN to modify your perceived location to a different area of the world, streaming worked a lot better with no buffering…HD even!
What is the most puzzling to me is how a company, that wouldn’t exist now without its technology infrastructure, and which has a net income of $2+ billion a quarter, and nearly a year in lead time before the fight, couldn’t possibly prepare better for this event. Things aren’t all well at Netflix.
Political polls continually forget to acknowledge the reality that there are a large group of people that will respond to these polls in the exact opposite way of how they intend to vote, purely out of sarcasm.
Happy 100th Birthday, May Bottke! (May was my Kindergarten Teacher at Lincoln Elementary School in 1983-1984, and I was the popcorn man in the Kindergarten circus!)
It was so great to have a few minutes to talk with this special lady. And yes, she still remembers my birthday!
Me touching the Apollo 13 Command Module…the machine that held together after a nearby service module explosion, and after being in a deep freeze in space, to get astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swaggert home in April of 1970. Picture from July 2017 @ The Cosmosphere, Hutchinson, Kansas.
Nice cloud rotation nearly right overhead tonight as a line of thunderstorms moved through!
It must have been an associated downburst that caused a LOT of mature tree damage in North Alexander park, and over by the King Mill Dam. Power was out in the northern part of Faribault for about 4 hours.
This seems like a good time to remind everybody about the Electronics Technician Association (International)’s Audio/Video Forensics Analyst certification program that we worked hard on several years ago.
Since 5 years ago, AI has become much bigger, and “deepfakes” are an even bigger issue now. Check out the sample video I shared below for a little shock value! Second guess what you see and hear. It may not be real!
Now, more than ever, it’s very important to use logic instead of emotion, facts instead of opinions, and multiple sources instead of a single news channel, when forming your own opinion about anything. Realize the importance of skilled experts in the future to assist with the detection of these threats.
I think I’ve figured out why it upsets me so much when people use generative AI to compose material to create nearly 100 percent of a letter or other writing project, and then not source it as AI generated.
I see this time and time again in my personal and professional life.
It’s not necessarily the fact that AI derives its output from people’s original copyrighted works without the owner’s permission. Although the courts are deliberating on that question now.
It’s not the fact that AI can be used positively, and that it can help us think outside the box when we can’t find the exact words to portray how we feel.
It’s certainly not the fact that properly used AI is being used right now to crunch huge datasets and clinical data to help find cures for diseases that have plagued us for decades.
What upsets me is the ego of some of its users!
Let me explain. Most of us can tell when a piece of writing is outside of the style or ability of its author. Most of us can tell when a paragraph or two sounds suspiciously like another boilerplate AI generated piece that we’ve read before. It’s incredibly easy to run a piece of writing through several AI detectors to confirm our beliefs. Yet, the “author” of the piece believes they can fool everyone with the lack of writing effort on their part, and that their “brilliant” effort will fly right over the heads of their uneducated and oblivious reading audience.
I’m here to tell them… No. It most definitely does not.
And it damages their credibility. The readers understand they weren’t worth more than a one or two sentence prompt to a generative AI robot. A 15 or 20 second effort at most.
When used as a thank you, it’s not heartfelt. The original act leading to the thank you was one of kindness, and the resulting thank you is one of dismissiveness.
Let’s not let generative AI do what can be done best and more intimately as true conversation and correspondence between friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.
*Story image generated by DALL-E 3, “Copilot” Bing AI from Microsoft
