Took a direct hit from Hurricane Ivan. Blew all our roofing off so the rain was blowing in and big chunks of ceiling were falling in while we were all huddled in the hallway. We found the roof of our back porch in the middle of the street, about 4 houses down. We’ve ridden out a lot of hurricanes over the decades, but Ivan was the scariest.

In the end we came out of it smelling like a rose. My wife’s parents had both recently passed, and we were planning on buying their house out of their estate. I was in the middle of readying our house for sale when the storm hit. Our house got wrecked, while the parents house was left pretty much unhurt, aside from a few missing shingles and a downed tree. We moved in immediately and ended up selling our house as-is to the “we buy ugly houses” people for about half it’s normal value, collected a fat insurance check from Liberty Mutual, which combined with the sale was enough to pay off the mortgage and pocket a few grand, which was right at what we hoped to sell it for because we didn’t have very much equity in it at the time. We ended up right where we planned on being, much sooner than we thought we would. We got lucky for sure…

It’s my house. Everyone in the family knows I’ll shut that shit down, so I look forward to seeing everyone 😁

I drink entirely too much coffee, and if I don’t be sure to drink plenty of water on top of it I’ll get constipated. It’s almost like the coffee dries me out or something. I had a chemo nurse tell me how important it was to stay hydrated during my treatments and when I told her I drink several cups of coffee a day, she scolded me and said In that case, I need the water even more. I followed her advice and since then I’ve gotten more regular. I used to think it was just normal for me to crap once every three days, but now I go every day and feel better too…

Ha! I have one of these sitting next to me on my desk. It’s multi-function, as it works great for reaching up and opening and closing my curtains too.

I went through the US Navy’s damage control and fire-fighting training back in '81 and we trained with their oxygen breathing apparatus (OBA). I remember we’d have to pull a pin like in a grenade to light them off, and when we were done we’d have to release the canister into a barrel of water because they were like super-hazardous…

it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that they don’t accent syllables the same way, if at all. Years ago I had a database teacher in community college who was from India and it took me a couple of classes to tune in to her, but after that it wasn’t hard to follow her at all. I’m often in Zoom meetings with a software engineer who immigrated from Vietnam and he was a bit of a challenge to understand at first, too.

Oh yeah… and my cancer doc is from Sri Lanka. That was doubly fun. His heavy accent pronouncing four-dollar medical terms took some serious getting used to. Listening to him dictate into his little recorder for the transcriptionists at the end of our visits is an added treat I always enjoy…

Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.

I see AI generated bullshit on youtube all the time these days. To the point where I can tell by the thumbnail before I even watch it. I’ve gotten in the habit of checking out new-to-me channels in a private window first, before deciding whether I want to subscribe or even keep watching. The instant I detect any AI… either in the voice or the nonsensical writing, I’m outa there. I do e-learning multimedia for a living, and we use a lot of stock images, and those sites are being loaded up with AI generated garbage. It’s getting harder to find stuff that isn’t AI, and using it to generate your own is a total crapshoot as far as results go…

… or in a porn flick?

Dick

… or flying over the fence?

Homer

Learned that lesson… I work developing e-learning, and all of our stuff was built in Flash. Our development and delivery systems also relied heavily on Flash components cooperating with HTML and Javascript. It was a monumental undertaking when we had to convert everything to HTML5. When our system was first developed and implemented, we couldn’t foresee the death of Flash, and as mobile devices became more ubiquitous, we never imagined anyone would want to take our training on those little bitty phone screens. Boy were we wrong. There was a time when I really wanted to tell Steve Jobs he could take his IOS and cram it up his cram-hole…