Reid Solberg

Ooh. I haven't seen ketchup Doritos for the last couple years. They'd been selling them in retro packaging every summer for a few years.

Where's the ketchup? 🤣

I recently started a new job where Windows and Office are the norm. Word behaves as expected, converting the -- into —, but boy does Excel hate that. It will automagically change a text cell into a formula and then complain about the value. I need to start using Alt+0151 again.

More pine siskin vs dandelion

This pine siskin was especially gregarious yesterday, hopping over to this dandelion while I was standing there.

Also, the Irony Alarm.

Oh hi 64-bit PCI!

An electronic weather display indicating negative 11 degrees Celsius.

UGH!

Fortunately, I'm not in the US, so I don't have to deal with discrimination from health insurance companies, and generally not from my own governments, but I'm not naieve to the implications. I suppose the potential benefit of finding gainful employment outweighs the risks for me, in my situation.

I hate that it's a conundrum for anyone. I can certainly understand having to weigh the risk vs benefit, particularly in the current societal and political dumpster fire. I'm in a position where I'm having great difficulty navigating the job market, and assessment will lead to more help.

Holy weight distribution, Batman!

A collection of brightly coloured stones arranged on a white background.

These are just out of the first stage of tumbling (coarse grit, 7 days) and are already looking pretty amazing.

Brr it's a chilly one this morning. At first glance, I thought the heavy frost on the trees was snow.

I'm shaking my head at the commenter's obliviousness, while realizing that cancer research is a thorn in Trump's bizarre pro-asbestos narrative.

Assistant used to do a good job of asking for confirmation when it couldn't confidently parse a command. Echo/Alexa used to be terrible for just saying "Okay!" and doing the wrong thing, while Assistant would say "I didn't quite get that" and/or prompt to confirm the action. Latency is awful now too

One of the justifications I saw for the deprecation at the time was a reallocation of resources to Gemini/AI integrations in Assistant, which were supposed to offer better conversational interactions and improved speech synthesis. It still hasn't rolled out to me 18 months later.

In June 2023, Google deprecated the Conversational Actions API for Assistant. One of the casualties was "Lucky Trivia," the popular interactive trivia quiz game that dated back to 2016. I found that the overall Assistant experience began going sharply downhill at that point.

Mine has become insufferable for home control. "Turn off the front light." "TURNING ON 26 LIGHTS!" It used to work almost perfectly. Yesterday it started playing Nelly Furtado's Turn Off The Lights in a different room when I asked it to turn off a specific light.

UX & QA: "There's a problem. Good luck figuring out what it is."

It's disgusting, yet utterly predictable given the cast of characters involved.

That sounds really dismissive and frustrating. I hope you're able to move beyond that experience and get to the bottom of things. Someone experiencing this attitude could try turning the discussion around to "these issues are making me more anxious," which ought to prompt more investigation.

Scene showing river estuary and ocean at low tide, with blue skies on a clear day. In the foreground, there is a large tree trunk, lit by late afternoon sunshine.

Some scenery from today's river walk. Chilly, but a beautiful day.

Somebody went to dinner... At The Old Spaghetti Factory! 🤣

If it's zero wait states, burst transfer could approach 50-66MiB/s at 25-33MHz. 16-bit ISA at 8.33MHz is 16.67MiB/s theoretical, but 8.33MiB/s with typical wait states/overhead.

Since it's running at the full bus speed, not AT clock, at 25 or 33MHz it's theoretically 3-4x 16-bit ISA, even if the 16-bit VLB is configured for 1 wait state.

Artie and I had a nice little hike to the river on Thursday.