I love boilerplate email.
LinkedIn (now owned by Microsoft) sent me an email with the following subject line:
Oh boy, people are looking at my LinkedIn profile (which I haven’t updated in probably three years)!
And in the email itself, all of the juicy details are revealed:
Yes, one person or possibly not-a-person-at-all has viewed my profile. This is very exciting indeed. Thanks for letting me know, LinkedIn!
A comment in response to an article on The Verge about how we should stop trusting Google search:
The people is stupid on the internet.
Stupid indeed.
To be fair the author of the comment was likely being deliberately colloquial or just committed a plain old grammatical error. In any case, his comments and the others, help underscore the main point of the article–people put a lot of trust in search engine results and Google, as God Emperor of Search–seriously, do you know anyone who uses Bing?–regularly trips up by elevating misinformation and fabrication and skewing results to the user in order to steer the user to the “desired” ads/companies/services.
There’s always DuckDuckGo. They take full aim at Google (without mentioning them by name, of course) the first time you hit their site with this card:
The professional napper.
There was a thin layer of crunchy snow on the ground this morning. It disappeared quickly and it was actually sunny for much of the day after, but the mountains are still bedecked with the white stuff, even if it’s now gone from down here.
But the point is it’s November 3rd and we’ve already had snow.
I forbid any more snow this fall or winter. It can go to the same place as pumpkin spice. That place is not here.
Damn snow.
In which minimal effort is expended on play time.
The entrance of the New Westminster SkyTrain station this past Sunday as I went to my writing group:
The guy who wrote this (and come on, you know it was a guy) is probably great fun to work with. Or exist with.
Also, that lopsided “u” (if that’s even what it is) disturbs me in ways I can’t really explain, though the switch from upper case on the left to lower case on the right is not so much disturbing as it is odd. Also also, does this guy carry around felt markers just so he can scribe his colorful opinions in public whenever a thought strikes him? I’m willing to say yes, he does.
Also x3: I wish I had something witty to offer regarding the guy wiping his nose under the LIQUOR STORE sign, but alas, nothing comes to mind.
Today was the first day of heavy rain in quite awhile. I’d almost forgotten how much I dislike this weather. The gusting wind did remind me how I prefer, even on horrible days like these, to go sans umbrella, because getting a bit wet (okay, very wet) is still better than desperately clutching to an umbrella, hoping it doesn’t get torn out of your hands by the elements or worse, it doesn’t get torn out of your hands and instead you get whisked away with it, Mary Poppins-style.
To commemorate today, here’s a shot I took after arriving home from work that shows the front entrance of our condo building turning into a lake.
It’s still better than snow. Sort of.
A few days ago, possibly prompted by an old song I’d heard somewhere, I thought about Gordon Downie, lead singer of The Tragically Hip, and how he was still around, more than a year after the band had completed their farewell tour due to Downie’s aggressive, untreatable brain cancer. I admired his resilience against what sounded like imminent death.
Today that death finally arrived and the way he spent this past year left me feeling not sad, but strangely happy at how he made his time–cut terribly short–truly count. He lived his life well, right up to the end.
I only ever bought one Tragically Hip album, Fully Completely (which is a great collection of songs) but there is no denying their impact on the Canadian cultural landscape. Just look at today’s iTunes Top 10 albums:
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Death, as always, is a great way to boost sales.
Farewell, Gordon. May your light burn bright wherever you are.
I say yes.
I mean, it’s a device that just spins and does nothing useful, like the U.S. president.
Although fidget spinners don’t have nuclear weapons at their disposal, so there is that.
Runner-up: Drones drones drones, as seen on Drone Daily Planet, where every other segment is about drones doing [thing] and isn’t it amazing and hey, here’s another drone story but these drones are doing [slightly different thing]. Also: drones. Hooray!
Me, dictating into the Message app:
Finished run, heading home.
Siri, interpreting:
Finished her own, heading home.
Somehow “run” becomes “her own.” Note the number of syllables isn’t even the same. Note that I’ve dictated this phrase before. Is it possible for AI to get dumber? I’m beginning to think so.
Oh Siri.
Mocking Apple technology making mincemeat of spoken–or written–phrases is a tradition going back almost 25 years. This is from August 1993:
Today there are entire sites dedicated to how iMessage mangles text through auto-correct. Sure, some of the examples are probably manipulated for maximum comic effect (though it’s really not necessary, as the worst of autocorrect hardly needs a helping hand to look bad), but the fact that there are entire sections of the internet devoted to this stuff speaks to how ubiquitous it is. (Also the best examples are the ones where people keep futilely typing the same autocorrected word over and over. You can almost feel the despair coming though their attempted messages.)
And then there’s Siri. Siri is great when it works properly, which for me is most of the time. But when Siri decides not to work, it gets really stubborn in insisting that you are speaking different words.
Here are two to start, the first I’ve mentioned before.
Pyramid: I try to tell Siri to play the album Pyramid. It tries to play the imaginary album Pure Mind. I was never able to get Siri to play Pyramid. I had to physically interact with my phone to listen to it. How 2007.
Winner: Siri
Pasta: I try to send the message “The pasta will be ready in two minutes.” Siri says, “The pastor will be ready in two minutes.” I keep trying different pronunciations/inflections/accents for “pasta” and get these results:
pasta = pastor
pasta = pastor
pasta = pastor
pasta = pastor
pasta = pasta
I don’t know what finally made it work and I have no confidence it will ever work again. I’m just glad I wasn’t sending the message to a pastor.
Winner: Me
I don’t have a sassy wrap-up for this (it’s my first entry, cut me some slack) but I will note that I just spent half an hour at that stupid autocorrect site, laughing more than I’d like to admit.
Back in January of 2016 I made this observation at the end of a post about the merging of the Vancouver Sun and Province news rooms:
The rise of the Internet has not only hit newspapers hard, but other print media, too. A few days ago I walked by Mayfair News on Broadway for the first time in quite awhile. This was once one of my favorite places to buy magazines as they had a huge selection. Today they have what appears to be half of one aisle devoted to magazines, about 1/6th of what they used to have, with the rest of the store converted over to a dollar store model, shelves stuffed with cheap plasticware and other small goods. On the one hand, it makes me sad to see the change, but on the other I admire their resilience and ability to adapt to a changing market.
I was recently in the area of Broadway and Granville and noticed Mayfair News seemed…not busy. I went over and sure enough, it was shuttered, its space sitting empty for perhaps months after I made the comment above. The book store/art shop beside it had also closed. The demise of Mayfair News meant the single best magazine store in Vancouver was gone.
Related, I noticed the current issue of Rolling Stone on Save On Foods’ tiny magazine shelf a few days ago while not shopping for eggnog. Despite having Trump on the cover, I picked it up and was shocked at how thin it was. It was less a magazine than a robust leaflet.
It was kind of depressing.
The Rolling Stone website, on the other hand, is packed full of content and covers events that have happened just today.
It’s hard to imagine why anyone would choose a print magazine now, unless they needed something to read right now and had no access to the internet or had an aversion to reading magazine-style articles on a smartphone/tablet/laptop.
Nothing lasts forever, but if you had told me 20 years ago that the magazine market would be seriously ailing shortly into the 21st century, I would have laughed and gone back to trying to make DOS games work in Windows 95.